Much of modern transnational humanitarian activity is organized around a notion of an ongoing wave of emergencies that requires constant volunteer interventions. Natural disasters, plagues, internal conflicts, mass population displacement, and wars, communicated by news and social media and publicized by transnational advocates serve as fertile grounds for this perception. But while such calamities have been an inseparable part of social life, the incessant concern they elicit among a growing transnational humanitarian community is very much a modern phenomenon. Read more »

In contrast to the usual workshop practice, but because I am stepping in here at the last minute, these are finished chapters from my forthcoming book, Solidarity in Strategy. But although the project is done, your questions and critiques will be helpful as I re-orient my thinking from the more private realm of discovery and scholarship to the more public realm of discussion (to the extent those realms are separable.) Read more »

When we, while entangled and immersed in everyday life, encounter phenomena that resist neat classification and that run counter to our expectations, we can cope with such experiences by various ways. In most cases we simply try to ignore weird encounters, and to treat the uncommon as if would be normal, regular and ordinary. These attempts can fail. We cannot, in this case, escape and avoid facing the anormal, disturbing and confusing phenomena. The weird, creepy and monstrous cross the boundary that is supposed to exclude it and to protect us. If it enters our internal and familiar realm, it has to be outdistanced again. Should it persist and, despite our efforts, not vanish beyond the horizon, we ourselves tend to retreat and to flee.
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What you have before you is not really a paper in the strict sense, but a text offering a preview onto a multi-volume book project. The material at hand will find its way into several chapters of the first volume. To cope with length issues I have minimized the theory part in the paper proper. Read more »

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Hi all,

Thanks in advance for reading.

The attached paper is an article draft I’m hoping to send out soon. I initially presented a paper on this topic as my second year paper (that draft is now a paper mostly about gender). Now, two years later I’ve gone back and added a ton more data, and attempted to develop a much more generalizable concept, and to weed out the 7 or 8 potential papers that were in my initial draft. since I’m very interested in casting off the shackles of my 2nd year paper, I’d like to note that I’m pretty wedded to the structure of this paper (and not planning to write any other papers from this). I’d really like feedback about how to make this paper work best within the structure I’ve currently set up. Read more »

Although scholarship on reality television has grown apace with the genre itself, very little of it focuses on issues of social class. This essay explores what might be considered the ‘performance logic’ of reality programming as it relates to the cultural politics of class. Having conducted ethnographic research on two different genres of reality television in the US (daytime talk shows in the 1990s and, more recently, the MTV docusoap Sorority Life), I am interested in the tensions between class as an embodied phenomenon and class as a discursive phenomenon as parlayed by social institutions such as the media. Read more »

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In this paper I explore the problems and tensions inherent in staging naturalistic zoo exhibits, which requires zoos to negotiate among a variety of competing aesthetic and organizational demands, including the cultural expectations of audiences, the educational mission of zoos, and the practicalities of managing live animal species. Read more »