Contexts

In 2008, we needed a hero. We still do.

Political narratives are all about heroes, and never was it more plainly evident than in the 2008 presidential contest between Barack Obama and John McCain. Like all candidates, Obama and McCain worked to craft their own heroic narratives, from despair to redemption to, each hoped, glory. And sociologists watched as the American public joined in on this process, seeing their hopes, dreams, and concerns filtered through opinion polls that were used to form the politicians into just the heroes these times called for. Candidates and voters colluded in myth-making in that block-buster election, but how has the victor's heroic reputation served him as he holds office?

It's now been a hundred years since the publication of Jane Addams's masterpiece, Twenty Years at Hull-House. By 1910, Addams's contemporaries already recognized her as America's most respected social reformer and saw Hull-House as the living symbol of the Progressive Era. Now the instantly popular book, one of eleven she authored, displayed Addams's distinctive gift of combining compelling story with insightful social analysis.

For much of 2009 and early 2010, discussions of health care policies dominated national discourse in the United States. The prolonged and often acrimonious debates brought into sharp focus the enormous, complex, and highly fragmented system that provides health care in the United States. Considerable attention was also devoted to demonstrating the advanced state of this country's medical knowledge, technology, and health services.

At a major conference on genetics in 2003, a team of researchers reported that the Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand, are far more likely than Caucasians to carry a variant of the MAOA gene that has been associated with aggressive behavior. The scientists argued that the difference made sense and reflected the fact that more aggressive individuals survived the migratory journey by which the Maori originally populated Aotearoa, the islands that would later become New Zealand.

People in every society throughout history have drawn moral lines prohibiting certain behaviors and lauding others, making judgments about right and wrong and what people should and should not do, think, and feel. Humans, it seems, are characteristically moral animals, with some of these moral impulses doubtlessly rooted in our biology.

Is God bad for women? Media consumers in North America and Europe are probably familiar with this narrative: conservative and fundamentalist religions—those that take religion seriously and politicize religiosity—are on the rise, and that's bad for women. In France, wearing a the headscarf in public spaces is decried as an affront to French notions of citizenship and to women's personhood. In the United States, Afghan women's plight at the hands of the Taliban was used as a justification for American intervention. Since the emancipation of women and the diversification of family forms and sexualities are among the hallmarks of modernity and secularization, and since fundamentalist religious groups tend to hold traditional views on gender, sexuality, and the family, conservative religions are typically viewed as antithetical to women's interests (not to mention modern, democratic ideals of choice and the freedom to chart one's own destiny).

“Did you hear some girl tried to kill herself over a guy?” I shook my head, well aware that the students perpetuating this campus-wide gossip had no idea that I was the reality behind the myth. From the comfort of my Intro to Sociology classroom, I had learned about Howard Becker's labeling theory and how self identity can be affected by deviant labeling. Little did I know then, I'd soon come to understand labeling from the acute perspective of an insider, namely that of the mentally ill. Within a few short weeks, I'd be in a psych ward.