Thursday, October 27, 2005
So, the White Sox won the World Series for the first time since 1917...
And Boy George, aka the President of the United States had to accept the withdrawl of Harriet Miers from the nomination for the supreme court. All in all, a good start to the day... I am doing a final edit on this first draft of my literature review for the Cruiser research for research methods class. 11 pages and nowhere near done, but thats ok...
Also, I have given statement of purpose to several professors for review and for use in writing me letters. It looks like I will have five letters of reccomendation. Three from sociology professors, one from the director of the Honors Program, and one from the director of the Writing Center. I am still freakng out but becoming more settled into the idea that it will all work out like it should...
Anyway, gotta go finish this...
Sunday, October 23, 2005
Here is a draft of my statement of purpose for Berkeley Grad School...
Comments and suggestions will be welcome...
Statement of Purpose in Graduate Education:
My goal is to be admitted to study in the doctoral program of the department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. I believe that UC Berkleley’s graduate program in sociology would be an ideal learning environment for honing my sociological knowledge and developing areas of concentration because of the diversity of faculty interests as well as the reputation of the University for commitment to public sociology and innovative academics in a rapidly changing world.
I am an adult re-entry student and single parent and managed to maintain a cumulative GPA in the neighborhood of 3.8 while working, raising my now thirteen-year-old son and carrying a full-time course load; my upper division GPA is 3.91, and I do not anticipate it slipping in the next two semesters. Furthermore, I was on the Presidents honor role at Santa Barbara City College for five consecutive semesters, was inducted into Phi Theta Kappa in the fall of 2002, and have been on the Deans List at CSU Stanislaus since transferring in the fall of 2004. I have already presented independent research at the CSU Stanislaus Honors Conference 2005 (Blue Water Sailors and the Network Society), the CSU Statewide Honors Conference 2004 (Sociology and Physiology of Amphetamine Abuse), and the 04-05 CSU Stanislaus Student Research Competition (Sociology and Physiology of Amphetamine Abuse) where I was awarded $100.00 as a runner-up in the undergraduate division. I have received scholarships every year that I have attended college, both for academic achievement and financial need. I also have every reasonable expectation of graduating Phi Beta Kappa.
I am also an officer of the campus Sociology Club, where we practice public sociology in an effort to aid the disadvantaged in the local community as well as cooperating in sociological research efforts with campus faculty, such as conducting survey research under Dr. George Mudeking on Stanislaus County homelessness and poverty. For employment and my own personal development, I tutor in the campus Writing Center half time. In the Writing Center, I work with freshman writers needing developmental assistance to continue course work at the college level, as well as with diverse students in various upper division and graduate programs who are working on complex papers. My experiences in this position have intensified my interests in institutional and educational sociology, causing me to question the goals/intent of primary and secondary education in this country in regards to whether actual education or normalization is the practical intent of the system. These questions resonate with me because of my own experiences in pre-college education that led me to leave school early and take more than a decade to come back.
In 2000, I got involved in homeless outreach, began working as a substance abuse counselor and went back to school. My initial major was substance abuse counseling, and I took all of the academic courses required for the Certificate. After a year, I decided that I wanted to continue my education through the PhD level and changed my major to sociology because it has a wider subject base and I believe that I can best serve both my own interests and society by exploring how the root causes of social problems and inequalities are attached to the regular functioning of global society as well as being deviant expressions of cultural values in disparate societies. I continued to work in treatment through my first three years of college, being promoted three times and receiving cumulative pay raises of more than 30%. My final title was Lead Counselor of the Santa Barbara Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse’s Residential Detox Program. My responsibilities included placing clients, coordinating with the legal system and other social services agencies, as well as group and individual counseling, staff training, scheduling, and other supervisory duties.
During that time, I ascertained that I wish to teach at the college level and do research into social practices relating to the division of power, property and prestige in the emerging global socio-economic system from a critical theoretical perspective. I believe that the realities of global capitalism and computer mediated communications technologies are dramatically changing the social landscape in heretofore-unpredictable ways and that it is of utmost importance for these developments to be closely observed and developed into new theoretical paradigms.
I believe that Berkeley would be an excellent fit for my educational goals, personal talents, and commitment to the study of social change, due to the schools reputation as one of the best in the country, as well as the fact that Berkeley has been widely recognized as an institution not afraid to challenge the power structure in society with research and practice. I am a strong believer in public sociology, and am committed to a lifetime of learning and applying what I learn to help others whenever possible. This is a legacy of my experiences as a young man on the edges of the system, as well as my experiences working in substance abuse treatment and homeless outreach. I want to teach at the University level, but I also want to engage the disadvantaged in a way that will enable at least some of them to benefit from a knowledge of how institutional inequalities work, and propagate in culture, and what may be done to get around them.
In the course of my undergraduate studies, I have not taken a specific concentration in the field of sociology. I originally intended to pursue an addiction studies concentration, but my interests have expanded with my knowledge base. In perusing my transcript one will find that I have taken classes involving inequalities, social change, globalization, race, gender, criminology and others related to hegemonic structures and discrimination in preference to more mainstream courses. Even the classes I have taken outside my major, in history, geography, anthropology and other fields have only accentuated my awareness of the increasing inequalities in our nation and our world.
The CSUS Sociology Club of which I am a board member has “Our hands, our community, our world, our responsibility.” as its motto, and our mission statement, which I wrote, reads, “We have come together to promote and engage in the study of Sociology, and to apply what we learn to improve the lives of people in our community and our world.” I believe in these tenets of Sociological practice, for if knowledge is power, and, with power comes responsibility, then it is the responsibility of the academic community to use its knowledge to help those who need it wherever possible. Unfortunately, those with economic and political power in this world do not seem to want to accept responsibility for the problems caused by using that power selfishly. That means the only way to change things is by educating the citizenry from the bottom up.
In addition to my class work in sociology and other academic commitments, I am a member of the Honors Program at CSU Stanislaus and am currently working on an independent research project to culminate in an honors thesis this spring. I am exploring the positive and negative aspects of the emergence of portable network communications technology upon the long-term Ocean Cruising subculture. To clarify, the Ocean Cruising subculture is made up of individuals and families who go to sea in small vessels (mostly sailboats with auxiliary engines) to travel the world, working port-to-port with no scheduled plan to return to shore bound life. I believe that studying the changes wrought by Computer Mediated Communications technology (CMC) in the day-to-day lives of Cruising sailors will be interesting and important in several ways. First, the diffuse, non-traditional nature of this subculture is interesting to those studying socialization because of the fact that they are so spread out, yet have managed to share subculture norms and values enough to qualify as a “lifestyle subculture” for many years now. One question of interest to sociology here is to ask, just what is the characteristic of this subculture that binds them together in the absence of close personal contact? Also, will the new ease of contact and the flood of new Cruisers brought by technological advances dilute these subcultural values and freedoms?
The Cruisers have only been studied by two sociologists as far as I have been able to determine, Dr. Jim Macbeth of Murdoch University, Perth, Australia (1985, 1992) and Dr. Gayle Jennings of Murdoch University (1999). Dr. Macbeth clearly explains how the Cruisers fit into the subculture category and calls them a “Subculture of positive deviance”, and Dr. Jennings ethnography shifts the focus of study to include feminist and diverse perspectives on the subculture. I intend to go in a completely different direction and examine the practical effects of new technology on the day-to-day lives of the Cruisers. The Cruisers were a “Network Subculture” before “networks” as we know them even existed, maintaining group bonds through unreliable mail services and pay phones in third world countries, and meeting up periodically in various ports before radio became common. Even then, they managed to maintain surprisingly close bonds throughout the network. Now, since the mid-nineties, email, cell service, satellite uplinks, and Wi-Fi have revolutionized communications for everyone.
There are some thousands of these boats cruising at any given time, and I have come to believe that studying the influence of CMC upon this subculture will prove useful in determining avenues for research in larger segments of society. This particular subculture’s entire social dynamic has been affected in more apparent ways by the new communications networks than most other segments of society because the Cruising subculture is made up of widely separated nodes (individual vessels) and the maintenance of subcultural norms, mores and values is almost entirely communications dependent. The effects of new communications technology are more rapidly and clearly visible amongst the Cruisers. In this effort, I am utilizing theoretical perspectives delineated by Dr. Manuel Castells in his Rise of the Network Society and The Power of Identity (1996, 2000), as well as considering ideas proposed by other theories such as those expressed in Dr. Mark Poster’s adaptation of Michael Foucault’s Panopticon concept in The Mode of Information (1990).
I would very much appreciate the opportunity to attend graduate school at Berkeley, I am interested in the Institute for the study of social change, the eXperimental social science laboratory, and the sociology department's commitment to public sociology. This school and this department’s doctoral program would be a wonderful experience for me, and I believe that I have some things to contribute to the department as well. Not the least of which are my obsession with the work, my commitment to good scholarship, and two decades of experience in various levels of American society.
Thursday, October 20, 2005
Another directed Journal entry from Race and Ethnicity class...
Directed Journal Entry #4, Racism Idea Wheel Revisited:
Looking back at what I wrote last week on the rays of this sun of Racism, I cannot but wonder why the last word I wrote was control. It probably should have been close to the top. I started with Fear, as I believe that the root of all racism and prejudice in general is fear, going back to the early days of humanity where they had to fear the unknown entities out there beyond the firelight. My second word was Difference, which is what we fear and leads to the third word that was Hate. Hate grows from fear, humanities response has always been to kill that which we fear and so my fourth word was Violence. My fifth word was Advantage, because once we resort to violence it is our nature to press the advantage and so there is conquest, genocide, and slavery. My sixth word is Abuse because it follows from violence and stems from advantage that is power over others. The seventh place is Exploitation because we always exploit anything we have power over to abuse. My eighth word was Justification because the belief that the other is somehow less than human justifies all the rest of it, and that belief has to be deep rooted or most people couldn’t sleep at night for all the carnage. My ninth and (almost) final word was aggression and it fits well here because once the cycle gets started - fear, hate, violence, and so on – it begins to feed on itself and breeds continuous aggression. At that point, I had run out of lines, and I was getting ready to put the paper in my binder until this week as you said to do when I stopped myself and picked my pen back up.
I looked at the page for a minute, thinking, and then I wrote Control smack in the center, just above the word Racism. Then I did put the page into my binder and left it to sit for a week as you had asked. I think that control is an important word here. Going back to the earliest days, when humanity traveled in small bands and fought for survival against the large predators and each other in a hard cold world. I expect that our ancestors felt that they had little control over their lives or their deaths, and the old religions give credence to this belief with their fractious, angry, and unpredictable gods. The animistic religions also, embodying nature with the minds and spirits of unhuman and often inimical designs. When bands of people met, they fought as often as not, fighting came naturally to them, after all, they had to fight against bigger beasts, and it seems likely from archeological evidence that our ancestors wiped out the Neathandral in a competition for territory. Violence is always about fear and feeling a lack of control over a situation, a person, or a thing.
If humanity were not so prone to violence, and so good at it, we might never have survived to become the dominant species on the planet. The problem seems to stem from the fact that we have defeated all enemies, except each other, and we have not yet evolved out of the instinct to respond to fear with violence and hatred. Technology has only exacerbated this effect as we no have unbelievable power over the world, to create and destroy, but we have not developed a coherent morality that equips us to handle this power with any responsibility. I am afraid of/for and in love with humanity, being human and all. We are wonderful and terrible; and the question remains, which part of our nature will triumph? The creative or the destructive? Will we evolve into a race capable of peace before we destroy the planet and ourselves? If we do not, and soon, it will be racism, nationalism, corporate greed, and other fear based destructive social behaviors that destroy us. This is certain.
One thing that might save us, for a time, is an encounter with a hostile alien species; an Other even more different from Black from White, Asian from Aborigine, might make us realize that we are all one blood under the skin. That would not be good though, it would just turn our most aggressive impulses outward once more. Either the Aliens would destroy us, or we would be loosed into the galaxy, hunting for the next Other to remind us who we are. Thankfully, or not, the odds of that scenario ever taking place are rather remote, and so we are stuck here with only ourselves and our fears for company…hopefully we will learn before it is too late…
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Have not had time to write anything except for school...
Here is another...
Ideology or Economy? Marx’s and Weber’s Philosophies Clash Over the War in Iraq.
According to David E. Sanger of the New York Times, the war in Iraq is far from over. In the following essay, I will use Marxist and Weberian social theories to examine the issues presented by Mr. Sanger in his article Administration's Tone Signals a Longer, Broader Iraq Conflict (10-17-05).
In Sanger’s Article, he points out that the Bush Administration has said that armed opposition to the countries interim government would fail as the country gained a constitution and began electing representatives because the Al Qaeda backed rebellion “…had nothing to offer Iraquis or the people of the Middle East” (p.1). This has been suggested to mean that once the new government is in place it will be time to bring American troops home. Recently, Administration Officials and the President have begun to indicate that the insurgency is turning into an ideological struggle and that rebels plan to, “…’establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.’ While he [Bush] still predicts victory, he appears to be preparing the country for a struggle of cold war proportions” (Sanger, p. 1-2). This is happening while Americans are beginning to call for an end to the conflict, and there is some concern by the Administration that support of Republicans seeking re-election may be lost.
Marx would say that the ideological conflicts here are really just an excuse, religion being used by the owners of the means of production on both sides to incite the masses into pursuing their respective economic ends. Marx would contend that the Iraqui insurgents are fighting to gain control of the means of production in the power vacuum left by the fall of SaddamHussein, they are trying to ensure that control of the oil fields does not go to the Western Bourgeois and so they are freedom fighters and should be supported by workers everywhere. He might concede that they are ignorant in their treatment of women and other ethnicities due to false consciousness imposed upon them by prior rulers through the “Opiate of the People,” in this case Islam, but once they had gained economic security they would slowly evolve beyond false consciousness and adopt true socialist brotherhood.
The U.S. interest in Iraq would also be clear to Marx. He would not be confused about the government seemingly losing money in the prosecution of this war, Marx would see that the money being spent is extracted from the citizenry in general and that it is going directly into the coffers of the Military Industrial Complex corporations. Marx would say that this was just business as usual for the Capitalist Class who exploit the working class today even more efficiently than they did in the nineteenth century.
In contrast to Marx’s insistence that the economic infrastructure drives all social action, Max Weber was ahead of his time in his belief that no one theoretical perspective can explain all of social action. Weber would say that the economic incentives in this war are important, but that this is fundamentally a conflict over ideas. The long history of conflict between Christianity and Islam, and the current tendencies towards radical fundamentalism in both religions make sense in the context of this conflict. The insurgent Sunni minority in Iraq is outnumbered by their Shiite co-religionists and they fear democracy as it would put them at the political mercy of the Shiites with whom there is a long history of violent inter-sectarian conflict much like the Protestant/Catholic schism that Weber spent time studying. Weber would say that President Bush being a fundamentalist Christian as important as is the fact that he is wealthy and comes from a family long connected with both politics and the arms trade. The fact that such a man was elected and that the bulk of his support is also of the Christian right tells the social scientist something important about the mood in America today. Weber would conclude that this return to religiosity is a traditionalist reaction to the increasing rationalization and bureaucratization of the modern world. The fact that there is growing opposition to the war in Iraq within the U.S. would also be ascribed by Weber to a conflict of ideals amongst the American people rather than an economic conflict between the haves and the have nots.
I agree with the Weberian stance on this issue, although I do not believe the Marxist view is entirely wrong. Weber’s great strength is the flexibility of his theoretical perspective and the fact that he allows for multiple agents of causation in any given situation. What I have done here is show how each of these great theorists would look at the reasons behind the War in Iraq, and explain why Weber’s perspective is more useful in describing a conflict rooted in antipathetic religious ideologies and other cultural conflicts. I particularly applaud how careful Coser was in his work to explain that Weber did not so much disagree with Marx as he felt that Marx’s focus on the means of production was too simplistic a causal determinant for something as complex as society. I tried to express this same sensitivity in acknowledging the importance of the materialist component in this war and President Bush’s socio-historical connection to wealth and arms the arms trade during my treatment of Weber’s theory.
Monday, October 10, 2005
OK, the GRE is out of the way...
I didn't do as well as I'd hoped, particularly on the math, but well enough for my purposes I think. I scored a 720 on the verbal which puts me in the 98th percentile or thereabouts, while I blew the math with a 580, that is still about forty points above the average doctoral candidate, but not nearly as well as I did on the practice tests. Anyway, I don't think the quantative is ver important in my field, what will carry more weight is the essays, and I won't get the score on those for a couple of weeks. However, I am confident that I will score at least a five and probably a six in that category (ona scale of 1-6) as writing has always been my best thing. Only a litle worried, because you can never tell who your readers might be.
I have another mid-term tomorrow and I am working on my letters of intent for Berekely and UC Santa Cruz right now, the applications are begun. In a few minutes, I have to head over to the library and tutor writing all day. The tutoring is cool, I enjoy it, but it is also time consuming and suprisingly draining. I am already eagerly awaiting Christmas break, maybe I will be able to catch up on sleep then.
Getting on towards time to actually send out the surveys for my Cruiser research, I gave an edited copy of it to my mentor Dr. Payne the other day, and to The honors program staff, and will submit to the IRB as soon as I get comments and suggestions back.
Anyway, gotta go to work...peace...
Monday, October 3, 2005
I'm going crazy around here....but swimming...
and today one of my professors from last year gave me a TA position as an independent studies class. This is cool, normally only 2nd year grad students are eligable for TA positions. The department does not have the money to pay me, so I get three credits for it as an independent studies course called the Sociology of Sociology. The course description reads - James will be helping me with the Introduction to Sociology course as I have over 100 students. He will be presenting lectures and small group study sessions along with proctoring exams - and it will not involve any strenuous studying, I may have to run a couple of tutoring sessions and give a lecture or two, but the real meat of the job is helping her make sure people are not cheating on exams. Furthermore, it is a fully weighted and graded class so it will help with boosting my GPA farther into the 3.9+ range...Bitchen...yeah...That also puts my units for the semester up to 20, oh my fucking lordship, that's a lot of work...
Well, I have two mid-terms tomorrow and a quiz, then I take the GRE Friday afternoon, so Pardon me for not being around much...Peace out to y'all...
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
For Tomorrow....
I had to write up a reasoned arguement expalining so what? So what about what, you ask? About why my research into Cruisers and technology is not only interesting but relevant. Well, here it is...
The First Draft anyway...
Why study CMC’s effects upon the Ocean-Cruising Subculture?
I believe that studying the changes wrought by Computer Mediated Communications technology in the day-to-day lives of Cruising sailors will be interesting and important in several ways. First, the diffuse, non-traditional nature of this subculture is interesting to those studying socialization because of the fact that they are so spread out, yet have managed to share subculture norms and values enough to qualify as a “lifestyle subculture” for many years now.
The Cruisers were a “Network Subculture” before networks as we know them even existed, maintaining group bonds through chancy mail services in third world countries and meeting up periodically in various ports before radio became common. Even then, most radios suitable for ocean sailing use were relatively short-range. It is really only since WWII that communications became even marginally better. Now, since the mid-nineties, email, cell service, satellite uplinks, and Wi-Fi have revolutionized communications for everyone.
Just imagine how much greater the impact of this technology would be if you were accustomed to having to sail into a town in some equatorial country, drop anchor, get in the dingy, motor to the dock, walk into the business district to find a payphone and then wait in line (sometimes for hours) to use it if you were lucky. If you were unlucky, the phone was not working that day. In the early nineties, that was how my parents had to call me and half the time I was not home so they had to try again later.
I am trying to find a way in, an angle, a lens through which to examine the new “social space” created by the arrival of the internet. I hypothesize that by examining the changes in the day-to-day experiences of the Cruisers, resulting from the availability of this technology, I will gain valuable insight on how these communications are effecting larger social systems, and be able to apply those lessons to developing research plans for use on larger systems and theoretical discourse with which to analyze the products of that research.
By “social space,” I mean space in the sense discussed by ManuelCastells in The Rise of the Network Society. In Social Theory, he informs us, space is simply the physical underpinnings of human social interaction. Social interaction may take many forms, in many types of space. A bar is a social space, so might a beach be, or a Football Stadium, and so is the Internet. It is a physical space made up of silicon and wire, LCDs, and electricity. It is a space unlike any other humankind has ever experienced, yet within this space there is human social interaction. In the network space, time is non-linear, memory is virtually perfect and disguise is common. The existence of this space has already changed the nature of global economics and politics, and it is rapidly changing nearly every other aspect of our lives. As such, it deserves to be examined carefully and with the understanding that the theories, lenses, or paradigms that have previously been sufficient for the discussion of social interaction may need to be re-examined in the light of the new reality we are confronted by.
posted by CSUS Sociology Club News at 9:55 PM
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