Sociology
-
Claire Birkenshaw “It is my professional opinion that now is the time to PANIC!” (Human Child Expert, Monsters, Inc.) It is a television news moment that is all too familiar: after broadcasting a series of eyewitness accounts, the News 13 anchor turns to a bespectacled, bow-tied expert to provide a calm and authoritative interpretation of events…
-
Claire Birkenshaw “I don’t want to survive. I want to live!” (Captain McCrea, WALL-E) The Ship of Consumption In History of Madness, Michel Foucault (1972/2009) examines how Western reason constituted itself through an evolving relationship with madness: first encountering it as an unsettling bearer of truth, then excluding it as unreason and, finally, transforming it into an…
-
Claire Birkenshaw “Chopper was my first lesson in the vast difference between myth and reality” (Gordie Lachance, Stand by Me) In Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Erving Goffman (1963/1990) argues that stigma is not an inherent attribute of individuals but a social relationship through which particular characteristics become discrediting. As such, virtually anyone is susceptible to…
-
Claire Birkenshaw “By means of strange incantations, they conjured up a new incarnation of evil, another grinning mask of fear, home to the constantly renewed magic of purification and exclusion” (Foucault, [1972] 2009, p.3). Film, as Sian Barber (2015, p.4) reminds us, is a “crafted artefact”, which is “never produced in a cultural and social…
Altered States of Academia 