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Post by teaching query on Jun 7, 2013 11:19:00 GMT -5
Hi all-
I'm teaching a "Social Problems" course for the first time this fall and am wondering if folks have any suggestions of good, accessible books on inequality that are pretty recent. I'm thinking of something along the lines of Nickel and Dimed, but written within the last 5 years. Any suggestions? Thanks for your help!
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Post by drbearjew on Jun 7, 2013 12:00:24 GMT -5
Not sure if it will meet your needs for a pop culture book, but The Missing Class by Katherine Newman and Victor Chen is a 2008 book that I find useful in getting my students to see an additional dimension of inequality.
Annette Lareau's Unequal Childhoods is another one that uses vignettes of specific families to make the data more impressionable. Good luck!
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Post by am guest on Jun 10, 2013 5:20:58 GMT -5
The Working Poor (Shipler) is older, but not as old as Nickel and Dimed and works well in teaching.
I second Lareau's Unequal Childhoods. The latest edition (2011) has a nice follow-up on the kids from the book.
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Post by poverty on Jun 11, 2013 3:12:41 GMT -5
chris hedges and joe sacco, days of destruction, days of revolt (2012)
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Post by OP on Jun 12, 2013 11:31:09 GMT -5
Thanks for these suggestions!!
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Post by one more on Jul 10, 2013 22:48:46 GMT -5
I third Annette Laureau's Unequal Childhoods. I also recommend Jen Silva's Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty. Another great Kathy Newman book is Taxing the Poor: Doing Damage to the Truly Disadvantaged.
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Post by runner on Jul 31, 2013 9:34:06 GMT -5
i don't get how most of these recommendations are "pop soc", or maybe i don't get what "pop soc" is? i mean, laureau's book won numerous national awards and is one of the most-cited soc articles of the last century. does "pop" just mean "readable"? in which case, WTF is wrong with sociologists that we consider anything well-written to be "pop"? (no offense meant to the OP - lots of people talk this way.) same with newman's work. ehrenreich, i'd consider pop soc because it's explicitly meant to be non-academic crossover but with a very sociological bent.
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Post by drbearjew on Jul 31, 2013 10:34:55 GMT -5
I took 'pop soc' to mean it's popular among sociologists and non-sociologists. If that is because it's explicitly meant to be a crossover book, okay. Though it wouldn't have to be. Michele Alexander's The New Jim Crow is quickly becoming a pop soc book, and I wouldn't call it a non-academic book. Murray Davis's What's So Funny? is a book on comedy and humor, but I wouldn't call it a pop soc book because it's written entirely to an academic audience.
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Post by popsoc on Dec 11, 2013 12:30:43 GMT -5
Very few sociology articles are inaccessible. Given our current undergraduate standards, we should not be assigning even further journalistic treatments of sociological subjects.
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Post by disagree on Dec 11, 2013 16:31:11 GMT -5
In my experience, students do sometimes have trouble accessing sociology articles (context: I teach at a selective/highly selective lib arts college). Being introduced to concepts or theories, statistical data, or understanding why some example of a phenomena is important to examine can be difficult for undergrads, especially for intro students, to grasp. You can of course provide this context in class, but it can also be nice to have students read books that they understand more immediately on their own (for example, Christakis & Fowler's book on networks, Newman's Accordion Family book, two I use in intro courses). And like others above, I think there's plenty of space for non-jargon-heavy work written for a broader (i.e. non-expert) audience, no need to poo-poo "journalistic treatments."
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