A “list” of social science texts that move us and continually captivate our minds and emotions.
We know good social science when we read it, sure… but there are books we love, articles we cherish. We haunt the stacks of a dark-paneled library of affecting social science. This work captivates and enchants. It helps us remember why we cared—and why we still do. We push these articles and books into the hands of colleagues and students; we save them for our children. They are our desert island monographs:
Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Part I (Vintage, 1995) develops the idea of biopower—the ways entire populations are controlled—through an analysis of discourses of sexuality. Along the way, he shows in ways that are painfully physical and concrete how power is written onto and into bodies.
Analyzing interviews and archival data documenting those who went South during the Civil Rights movement—and those who wanted to, but didn’t—Doug McAdam’s Freedom Summer (Oxford, 1988) explores how the 1964 voter registration and community outreach and education campaign changed those who participated in it. The appendices are amazing, and the epilogue is a killer.
Sabrina Zirkel and her coauthors report on a simple field trip to a successful urban school that led to a public conversation about “other kids” and how best to serve them. “Isn’t That What ‘Those Kids’ Need? Urban Schools and the Master Narrative of the ‘Tough, Urban Principal’” (Race Ethnicity and Education, 2011) opened our eyes wide.
In Richard Michael Fischl’s “A Woman’s World,” the author asks: “What if care work were socialized and police and fire protection left to individual families?” The men, in his scenario, are left unpaid, armed with knives and a bucket brigade. Their civil rights struggle is outlined, the world flips on its head and, in the last pages, the dagger twists (Buffalo Law Review, 1994).
A story of three brothers of Puerto Rican descent who are torn between street life, imprisonment, and the promises of decency draws upon an 18-year-ethnographic study in the northeastern United States. Timothy Black’s When A Heart Turns Rock Solid (Vintage, 2010) connects the personal to something greater without sacrificing specificity. Your heart turns liquid, reminded of all the chances and lucky breaks you’ve gotten—and others haven’t.
Arlie Hochschild’s now-classic study follows flight attendants and bill collectors in order to understand the commercialization of feeling and the management of emotion. The Managed Heart (University of California, 2003, second edition) seems painfully obvious once you’ve read it, but no one else has ever explained your own working life with such bleak precision.
Finally, Zygmunt Bauman’s “A Century of Camps?” in
Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality
, discusses industrialized genocide as an “accomplishment of our modern civilization,” founded upon moral distancing and the striving for rational order. Modernity never felt so cruel or the barriers between ourselves and others so intractable (Oxford, 1995).
Keep reading.
