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Laud Humphreys
Prophet of Homosexuality and Sociology
John F. Galliher, Wayne Brekhus, and David P. Keys
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
Laud Humphreys (1930–1988) was a pioneering and fearless sociologist, an Episcopal priest, and a civil rights, gay, and antiwar activist. In graduate school during the late 1960s, he conducted extensive fieldwork in public restrooms in a St. Louis city park to discover patterns of impersonal sex among men. He published the results in Tearoom Trade. Three decades later the book still triggers many debates about the ethics of his research methods. In 1974, he was the first sociologist to come out as gay. Laud Humphreys: Prophet of Homosexuality and Sociology examines the groundbreaking work through the life of a complex man and the life of the man through his controversial work. It is an invaluable contribution to sociology and a fascinating record of a courageous life.
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Learning More from Social Experiments
Evolving Analytic Approaches
Howard S. Bloom
Russell Sage Foundation, 2005
Policy analysis has grown increasingly reliant on the random assignment experiment—a research method whereby participants are sorted by chance into either a program group that is subject to a government policy or program, or a control group that is not. Because the groups are randomly selected, they do not differ from one another systematically. Therefore any differences between the groups at the end of the study can be attributed solely to the influence of the program or policy. But there are many questions that randomized experiments have not been able to address. What component of a social policy made it successful? Did a given program fail because it was designed poorly or because it suffered from low participation rates? In Learning More from Social Experiments, editor Howard Bloom and a team of innovative social researchers profile advancements in the scientific underpinnings of social policy research that can improve randomized experimental studies. Using evaluations of actual social programs as examples, Learning More from Social Experiments makes the case that many of the limitations of random assignment studies can be overcome by combining data from these studies with statistical methods from other research designs. Carolyn Hill, James Riccio, and Bloom profile a new statistical model that allows researchers to pool data from multiple randomized-experiments in order to determine what characteristics of a program made it successful. Lisa Gennetian, Pamela Morris, Johannes Bos, and Bloom discuss how a statistical estimation procedure can be used with experimental data to single out the effects of a program's intermediate outcomes (e.g., how closely patients in a drug study adhere to the prescribed dosage) on its ultimate outcomes (the health effects of the drug). Sometimes, a social policy has its true effect on communities and not individuals, such as in neighborhood watch programs or public health initiatives. In these cases, researchers must randomly assign treatment to groups or clusters of individuals, but this technique raises different issues than do experiments that randomly assign individuals. Bloom evaluates the properties of cluster randomization, its relevance to different kinds of social programs, and the complications that arise from its use. He pays particular attention to the way in which the movement of individuals into and out of clusters over time complicates the design, execution, and interpretation of a study. Learning More from Social Experiments represents a substantial leap forward in the analysis of social policies. By supplementing theory with applied research examples, this important new book makes the case for enhancing the scope and relevance of social research by combining randomized experiments with non-experimental statistical methods, and it serves as a useful guide for researchers who wish to do so.
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The Legal Analyst
A Toolkit for Thinking about the Law
Ward Farnsworth
University of Chicago Press, 2007

There are two kinds of knowledge law school teaches: legal rules on the one hand, and tools for thinking about legal problems on the other. Although the tools are far more interesting and useful than the rules, they tend to be neglected in favor of other aspects of the curriculum. In The Legal Analyst, Ward Farnsworth brings together in one place all of the most powerful of those tools for thinking about law.

From classic ideas in game theory such as the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” and the “Stag Hunt” to psychological principles such as hindsight bias and framing effects, from ideas in jurisprudence such as the slippery slope to more than two dozen other such principles, Farnsworth’s guide leads readers through the fascinating world of legal thought. Each chapter introduces a single tool and shows how it can be used to solve different types of problems. The explanations are written in clear, lively language and illustrated with a wide range of examples.

The Legal Analyst is an indispensable user’s manual for law students, experienced practitioners seeking a one-stop guide to legal principles, or anyone else with an interest in the law.

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Liberating Method
Feminism and Social Research
Marjorie Devault
Temple University Press, 1999
Feminist scholars, and those inspired by other liberatory movements, have raised profound questions about the standard practices of social research. Arguing that established methods too often ignore and obfuscate social oppression, they search for approaches that will more adequately represent marginalized groups and the social processes that organize their lives. Liberating Method charts one researcher's view of this project as Marjorie L. DeVault, one of the leading practitioners and teachers of feminist methodology, examines in her collection of new and previously published essays the dimensions of feminist research.

DeVault believes in "writing carefully," that is with care (precision) and caring (empathy). In addition to essays on how women write, are silenced, and can speak up, she includes an autobiographical sketch, a discussion of "the self as resource," and a section on what she calls "excavation," or the work of recovering unrecognized or suppressed aspects of women's experience. She explores the sources and meanings of feminist methodology, the strategies of reflexive analysis, and  the issues that arise when writing and teaching feminist research. Committed to a feminism attentive to oppressions that operate simultaneously with gender, DeVault considers exclusions and distortions in feminist research and strategies for building more inclusive approaches. Including a closing essay that presents "practical advice" for oppositional researchers,  LiberatingMethod reflects DeVault's conviction that feminist insights can and should contribute to a sounder, more rigorous social science.
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Library Service And Learning
Empowering Students, Inspiring
Theresa McDevitt
American Library Association, 2018

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The Limits of Critique
Rita Felski
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Why must critics unmask and demystify literary works? Why do they believe that language is always withholding some truth, that the critic’s task is to reveal the unsaid or repressed? In this book, Rita Felski examines critique, the dominant form of interpretation in literary studies, and situates it as but one method among many, a method with strong allure—but also definite limits.

Felski argues that critique is a sensibility best captured by Paul Ricoeur’s phrase “the hermeneutics of suspicion.” She shows how this suspicion toward texts forecloses many potential readings while providing no guarantee of rigorous or radical thought. Instead, she suggests, literary scholars should try what she calls “postcritical reading”: rather than looking behind a text for hidden causes and motives, literary scholars should place themselves in front of it and reflect on what it suggests and makes possible.

By bringing critique down to earth and exploring new modes of interpretation, The Limits of Critique offers a fresh approach to the relationship between artistic works and the social world.
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Limits of the Numerical
The Abuses and Uses of Quantification
Edited by Christopher Newfield, Anna Alexandrova, and Stephen John
University of Chicago Press, 2022
This collection examines the uses of quantification in climate science, higher education, and health.
 
Numbers are both controlling and fragile. They drive public policy, figuring into everything from college rankings to vaccine efficacy rates. At the same time, they are frequent objects of obfuscation, manipulation, or outright denial. This timely collection by a diverse group of humanists and social scientists challenges undue reverence or skepticism toward quantification and offers new ideas about how to harmonize quantitative with qualitative forms of knowledge.   

Limits of the Numerical focuses on quantification in several contexts: climate change; university teaching and research; and health, medicine, and well-being more broadly. This volume shows the many ways that qualitative and quantitative approaches can productively interact—how the limits of the numerical can be overcome through equitable partnerships with historical, institutional, and philosophical analysis. The authors show that we can use numbers to hold the powerful to account, but only when those numbers are themselves democratically accountable.
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Lines of Thought
Discourse, Architectonics, and the Origin of Modern Philosophy
Claudia Brodsky Lacour
Duke University Press, 1996
It is considerably easier to say that modern philosophy began with Descartes than it is to define the modernity and philosophy to which Descartes gave rise. In Lines of Thought, Claudia Brodsky Lacour describes the double origin of modern philosophy in Descartes’s Discours de la méthode and Géométrie, works whose interrelation, she argues, reveals the specific nature of the modern in his thought. Her study examines the roles of discourse and writing in Cartesian method and intuition, and the significance of graphic architectonic form in the genealogy of modern philosophy.
While Cartesianism has long served as a synonym for rationalism, the contents of Descartes’s method and cogito have remained infamously resistant to rational analysis. Similarly, although modern phenomenological analyses descend from Descartes’s notion of intuition, the “things” Cartesian intuitions represent bear no resemblance to phenomena. By returning to what Descartes calls the construction of his “foundation” in the Discours, Brodsky Lacour identifies the conceptual problems at the root of Descartes’s literary and aesthetic theory as well as epistemology. If, for Descartes, linear extension and “I” are the only “things” we can know exist, the Cartesian subject of thought, she shows, derives first from the intersection of discourse and drawing, representation and matter. The crux of that intersection, Brodsky Lacour concludes, is and must be the cogito, Descartes’s theoretical extension of thinking into material being. Describable in accordance with the Géométrie as a freely constructed line of thought, the cogito, she argues, extends historically to link philosophy with theories of discursive representation and graphic delineation after Descartes. In conclusion, Brodsky Lacour analyzes such a link in the writings of Claude Perrault, the architectural theorist whose reflections on beauty helped shape the seventeenth-century dispute between “the ancients and the moderns.”
Part of a growing body of literary and interdisciplinary considerations of philosophical texts, Lines of Thought will appeal to theorists and historians of literature, architecture, art, and philosophy, and those concerned with the origin and identity of the modern.
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The Linguistic Turn
Essays in Philosophical Method
Edited by Richard M. Rorty
University of Chicago Press, 1992
The Linguistic Turn provides a rich and representative introduction to the entire historical and doctrinal range of the linguistic philosophy movement. In two retrospective essays titled "Ten Years After" and "Twenty-Five Years After," Rorty shows how his book was shaped by the time in which it was written and traces the directions philosophical study has taken since.

"All too rarely an anthology is put together that reflects imagination, command, and comprehensiveness. Rorty's collection is just such a book."—Review of Metaphysics
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Listening Myths
Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching
Steven Brown
University of Michigan Press, 2011

This volume was conceived as a "best practices" resource for teachers of ESL listening courses in the way that Vocabulary Myths by Keith S. Folse (and Writing Myths by Joy Reid) is one for reading and vocabulary teachers. It was written to help ensure that teachers of listening are not perpetuating the myths of teaching listening.

Both the research and pedagogy in this book are based on the newest research in the field of second language acquisition. Steven Brown is the author of the Active Listening textbook series and is a teacher trainer.

The myths debunked in this book are:

§  Listening is the same as reading.

§  Listening is passive.

§  Listening equals comprehension.

§  Because L1 language ability is effortlessly acquired, L2 listening ability is too.

§  Listening means listening to conversations.

§  Listening is an individual, inside-the-head process.

§  Students should only listen to authentic materials.

§  Listening can’t be taught.

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Listening to People
A Practical Guide to Interviewing, Participant Observation, Data Analysis, and Writing It All Up
Annette Lareau
University of Chicago Press, 2021
This book will help you:
  • Understand the importance of talking to others, including listening to feedback from others while conducting research 
  • Recognize that there is not only one right way to sculpt your study
  • Learn how to plan the early stages of a project such as designing the study and choosing whom to study
  • See how to navigate the IRB and how to perform practical matters while collecting data
  • Learn how to plan before an interview and how to construct an interview guide 
  • Read real-life interviews with notes showing what probes work well and which are less successful 

A down-to-earth, practical guide for interview and participant observation and analysis.

In-depth interviews and close observation are essential to the work of social scientists, but inserting one’s researcher-self into the lives of others can be daunting, especially early on.  Esteemed sociologist Annette Lareau is here to help. Lareau’s clear, insightful, and personal guide is not your average methods text. It promises to reduce researcher anxiety while illuminating the best methods for first-rate research practice.
 
As the title of this book suggests, Lareau considers listening to be the core element of interviewing and observation. A researcher must listen to people as she collects data, listen to feedback as she describes what she is learning, listen to the findings of others as they delve into the existing literature on topics, and listen to herself in order to sift and prioritize some aspects of the study over others. By listening in these different ways, researchers will discover connections, reconsider assumptions, catch mistakes, develop and assess new ideas, weigh priorities, ponder new directions, and undertake numerous adjustments—all of which will make their contributions clearer and more valuable.
 
Accessibly written and full of practical, easy-to-follow guidance, this book will help both novice and experienced researchers to do their very best work. Qualitative research is an inherently uncertain project, but with Lareau’s help, you can alleviate anxiety and focus on success.
 
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Lithic Analysis and Cultural Inference
A Paleo-Indian Case
Edwin N. Wilmsen
University of Arizona Press, 1970
The Anthropological Papers of the University of Arizona is a peer-reviewed monograph series sponsored by the School of Anthropology. Established in 1959, the series publishes archaeological and ethnographic papers that use contemporary method and theory to investigate problems of anthropological importance in the southwestern United States, Mexico, and related areas
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Little Tools of Knowledge
Historical Essays on Academic and Bureaucratic Practices
Peter Becker and William Clark, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2001
This volume brings historians of science and social historians together to consider the role of "little tools"--such as tables, reports, questionnaires, dossiers, index cards--in establishing academic and bureaucratic claims to authority and objectivity.
From at least the eighteenth century onward, our science and society have been planned, surveyed, examined, and judged according to particular techniques of collecting and storing knowledge. Recently, the seemingly self-evident nature of these mundane epistemic and administrative tools, as well as the prose in which they are cast, has demanded historical examination.
The essays gathered here, arranged in chronological order by subject from the late seventeenth to the late twentieth century, involve close readings of primary texts and analyses of academic and bureaucratic practices as parts of material culture. The first few essays, on the early modern period, largely point to the existence of a "juridico-theological" framework for establishing authority. Later essays demonstrate the eclipse of the role of authority per se in the modern period and the emergence of the notion of "objectivity."
Most of the essays here concern the German cultural space as among the best exemplars of the academic and bureaucratic practices described above. The introduction to the volume, however, is framed at a general level; the closing essays also extend the analyses beyond Germany to broader considerations on authority and objectivity in historical practice.
The volume will interest scholars of European history and German studies as well as historians of science.
Peter Becker is Professor of Central European History, European University Institute. William Clark is Lecturer in History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University.
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Living Folklore, 2nd Edition
An Introduction to the Study of People and Their Traditions
Martha Sims and Martine Stephens
Utah State University Press, 2011

Living Folklore is a comprehensive, straightforward introduction to folklore as it is lived, shared and practiced in contemporary settings. Drawing on examples from diverse American groups and experiences, this text gives the student a strong foundation—from the field's history and major terms to theories and interpretive approaches.

Living Folklore moves beyond genres and classifications, and encourages students who are new to the field to see the study of folklore as a unique approach to understanding people, communities, and day-to-day artistic communication.

This revised edition incorporates new examples, research, and theory along with added discussion of digital and online folklore.

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Living Folklore
Introduction to the Study of People and their Traditions
Martha Sims and Martine Stephens
Utah State University Press, 2005

Living Folklore is a comprehensive, straightforward introduction to folklore as it is lived, shared and practiced in contemporary settings. Drawing on examples from diverse American groups and experiences, this text gives the student a strong foundation—from the field’s history and major terms to theories, interpretive approaches, and fieldwork.

Many teachers of undergraduates find the available folklore textbooks too complex or unwieldy for an introductory level course. It is precisely this criticism that Living Folklore addresses; while comprehensive and rigorous, the book is specifically intended to meet the needs of those students who are just beginning their study of the discipline. Its real strength lies in how it combines carefully articulated foundational concepts with relevant examples and a student-oriented teaching philosophy.

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Living in the Rock N Roll Mystery
Reading Context, Self, and Others as Clues
H. L. Goodall, Jr.
Southern Illinois University Press, 1991

Mystery, rather than “problem,” provides the con­text that the cultural ethnographer best uses to ap­proach the experience of both the living and the writ­ing of culture. In this work, H. L. Goodall, Jr., continues his discussion of the cultural ethnographer as detective through an investigation of what he calls the “rock n roll mystery.”

Using Bakhtin’s notion of “Carnival,” Goodall posi­tions rock n roll as an important aspect of the American cultural experience using its lyrics and rhythm as a force of resistance to the dominant bureaucratic order. He argues that interpretive eth­nography, where sentences use rhythms and emo­tions along with words to construct a work, parallels rock n roll in its creation of multiple voices strug­gling for creative and interpretive presence and space in the text. As there is no privileged text in the social life of rock n roll, there is no privileged voice in the writing of interpretive ethnography. It is, instead, a reading and writing method within the field of communication and the field of cultural studies that challenges the “existing wisdom.”

Goodall invites the reader to join him in the role of the detective who confronts, enters, and then participates in the mysteries of living. Through the use of his interpretive method, Goodall is able to move under the skin of experience to disclose the relationship among self, other(s), and context, an understanding only achieved by “going beneath the often cosmetic surfaces of cultural traffic to where symbols mingle with the driven stuff of life.” Be­cause the “stuff of life” is laid out on the pages of this book, Goodall’s text is as compelling as a good novel and in some ways more intimate.

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Living in the Stone Age
Reflections on the Origins of a Colonial Fantasy
Danilyn Rutherford
University of Chicago Press, 2018
In 1961, John F. Kennedy referred to the Papuans as “living, as it were, in the Stone Age.” For the most part, politicians and scholars have since learned not to call people “primitive,” but when it comes to the Papuans, the Stone-Age stain persists and for decades has been used to justify denying their basic rights. Why has this fantasy held such a tight grip on the imagination of journalists, policy-makers, and the public at large?
 
Living in the Stone Age answers this question by following the adventures of officials sent to the New Guinea highlands in the 1930s to establish a foothold for Dutch colonialism.  These officials became deeply dependent on the good graces of their would-be Papuan subjects, who were their hosts, guides, and, in some cases, friends. Danilyn Rutherford shows how, to preserve their sense of racial superiority, these officials imagined that they were traveling in the Stone Age—a parallel reality where their own impotence was a reasonable response to otherworldly conditions rather than a sign of ignorance or weakness. Thus, Rutherford shows, was born a colonialist ideology.
 
Living in the Stone Age is a call to write the history of colonialism differently, as a tale of weakness not strength. It will change the way readers think about cultural contact, colonial fantasies of domination, and the role of anthropology in the postcolonial world.
 
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Local History Reference Collections for Public Libraries
Kathy Marquis
American Library Association, 2015

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The Logic of Social Research
Arthur L. Stinchcombe
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Arthur L. Stinchcombe has earned a reputation as a leading practitioner of methodology in sociology and related disciplines. Throughout his distinguished career he has championed the idea that to be an effective sociologist, one must use many methods. This incisive work introduces students to the logic of those methods.

The Logic of Social Research orients students to a set of logical problems that all methods must address to study social causation. Almost all sociological theory asserts that some social conditions produce other social conditions, but the theoretical links between causes and effects are not easily supported by observation. Observations cannot directly show causation, but they can reject or support causal theories with different degrees of credibility. As a result, sociologists have created four main types of methods that Stinchcombe terms quantitative, historical, ethnographic, and experimental to support their theories. Each method has value, and each has its uses for different research purposes.

Accessible and astute, The Logic of Social Research offers an image of what sociology is, what it's all about, and what the craft of the sociologist consists of.
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Looking at Cities
Allan B. Jacobs
Harvard University Press, 1985

Allan Jacobs has written a city planning book for everyone with a passion for urban environments. His message--conveyed in word and vivid image--is that the people who make changes in cities base their decisions upon what they see, and that their visions and actions, which affect the lives of millions, have too often been faulty. This book is about how to look at and understand urban environments.

In order to plan sensitively, the city and regional planner must walk in, look at, wonder about, and simply enjoy cities. Careful observation is a crucial tool for the kind of analysis and questioning necessary to achieve good planning. Through observation the city planner and urban activist can learn when an area was built, for whom it was built, who lives there now, how it has changed, and how it might be improved for present and future inhabitants.

Jacobs shows us how to read cities by identifying and discussing the many visual clues and their various meanings in different environments. Case studies of American and European cities--San Jose, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Bologna, Rome--and over two hundred striking photographs, drawings, and maps by the author present ways to read the environment that will prove indispensable for urban planners and will delight all city watchers.

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Looking at Lives
American Longitudinal Studies of the Twentieth Century
Erin Phelps
Russell Sage Foundation, 2002
The impact of long-term longitudinal studies on the landscape of twentieth century social and behavioral science cannot be overstated. The field of life course studies has grown exponentially since its inception in the 1950s, and now influences methodologies as well as expectations for all academic research. Looking at Lives offers an unprecedented "insider's view" into the intentions, methods, and findings of researchers engaged in some of the 20th century's landmark studies. In this volume, eminent American scholars—many of them pioneers in longitudinal studies—provide frank and illuminating insights into the difficulties and the unique scientific benefits of mounting studies that track people's lives over a long period of time. Looking at Lives includes studies from a range of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, and education, which together cover a span of more than fifty years. The contributors pay particular attention to the changing historical, cultural, and scientific context of their work, as well as the theoretical and methodological changes that have occurred in their fields over decades. What emerges is a clear indication of the often unexpected effects these studies have had on public policies and public opinion—especially as they relate to such issues as the connection between poverty and criminal behavior, or the consequences of teen-age pregnancy and drug use for inner-city youth. For example, David Weikart reveals how his long-term research on preschool intervention projects, begun in 1959, permitted him to show how surprisingly effective preschool education can be in improving the lives of disadvantaged children. In another study, John Laub and Robert Sampson build on findings from a groundbreaking study begun by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck in the 1950s to reveal the myriad ways in which juvenile delinquency can predict criminal behavior in adults. And Arland Thornton, Ronald Freedman, and William Axinn employ an intergenerational study of women and their children begun in 1962 to examine the substantial relaxation of social mores for family and individual behavior in the latter decades of the 20th century. Looking at Lives is full of striking testimony to the importance of long-term, longitudinal studies. As a unique chronicle of the origins and development of longitudinal studies in America, this collection will be an invaluable aid to 21st century investigators who seek to build on the successes and the experiences of the pioneers in life-course studies.
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Lords of the Fly
Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life
Robert E. Kohler
University of Chicago Press, 1994
The common fruit fly, Drosophila, has long been one of the most productive of all laboratory animals. From 1910 to 1940, the center of Drosophila culture in America was the school of Thomas Hunt Morgan and his students Alfred Sturtevant and Calvin Bridges. They first created "standard" flies through inbreeding and by organizing a network for exchanging stocks of flies that spread their practices around the world.

In Lords of the Fly, Robert E. Kohler argues that fly laboratories are a special kind of ecological niche in which the wild fruit fly is transformed into an artificial animal with a distinctive natural history. He shows that the fly was essentially a laboratory tool whose startling productivity opened many new lines of genetic research. Kohler also explores the moral economy of the "Drosophilists": the rules for regulating access to research tools, allocating credit for achievements, and transferring authority from one generation of scientists to the next.

By closely examining the Drosophilists' culture and customs, Kohler reveals essential features of how experimental scientists do their work.
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