blogging contexts
Brayden
I’m so late to the game. I just discovered that Contexts, the official ASA publication for the masses, has not just one blog but two, and they’ve been up and running for a couple of weeks. Contexts crawler collects evidence of the sociological imagination from the web (e.g., drawing attention to news articles that quote sociologists). Contexts discoveries summarizes recent research in sociology journals. Both blogs are maintained by Chris Uggen and grad students from the University of Minnesota. The blog format and design is very sharp and reductionist. I’m a big fan of the content too.
You can probably guess that I think this is a great idea. The Contexts blogs are great resources for disseminating information and communicating research to a broader audience. If I were teaching an intro to sociology course I would consider making the blogs required reading for the students. I also think the blogs are a great way to introduce the magazine to an Internet-savvy public. And, of course, there’s also something in there for the professional sociologist. For example, I didn’t know that “workers who blog about their jobs have subversive political potential even while participating in the corporate capitalist system.” Viva la revolucion!
Very cool!
tf
February 13, 2008 at 7:15 am
I’m new to blogging too. Those pages are useful, but I can’t get the rss feeds to work. Does anyone else have that problem?
Aleen
February 13, 2008 at 10:18 am
Hey, thanks for the kind words and links!
Aleen, the RSS feeds were indeed broken…but I just fixed them.
smajda
February 13, 2008 at 3:22 pm
We are all marxists now.
shakha
February 13, 2008 at 4:12 pm
smajda does the heavy lifting for contexts online, but we both look to orgtheory for inspiration.
chris
February 14, 2008 at 5:58 am
The knee-jerk anti-Marxism on this site is extremely off-putting to those of us who actually engage theory in our work. Can you name a major social theorist of the 20th century who didn’t engage deeply with Marxism?
Göran
February 17, 2008 at 4:22 am
“Göran” — If you want to leave a pseudonymous comment, that’s fine. But it’s not OK to impersonate someone, even when it’s not all that likely that they would be reading orgtheory. Thanks.
Kieran
February 17, 2008 at 5:33 am
Another one of those “stop making me read this terrible website” complaints. This is getting odd. Don’t like the knee jerk anti-Marxism, don’t read those dumb knee jerk anti-Marxists.
You can name a slew of 20th century theorists who “deeply engaged with Marx” only to ultimately reject Marxism as stultifying and limiting. In fact a short way to write the history of both Western Marxism and social theory in the 20th century is the following: young theorist is impressed with Marx, only to discover later that if he or she is actually going to account for the world, then he or she better learn (or spontaneously reinvent) some Weber and Durkheim. This story is consistent with the theoretical career of people covering the entire knowledge-political spectrum from Jurgen Habermas to Pierre Bourdieu to Daniel Bell. And clearly as this particular blog is called orgtheory not “justtheory” it is a tad unrealistic to expect odes to the Marxist theory of organizations, when one of the key problems in Western Marxism has been precisely the lack of a theory of organizations (hence the fact that most Western Marxism is in fact Weberian-Marxism, beginning with the granddady Georg Lukacs, who as Habermas pointed out recently took most of his good ideas–like the members of the Frankfurt School–from Simmel [without acknowledgment of course; the bad ideas came from Hegel]).
Omar
February 17, 2008 at 1:30 pm
That should be the tagline of another blog – “If it ain’t Marx, it ain’t theory!”
brayden
February 17, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Tout ce que je sais, c’est que je ne suis pas marxiste.
Kieran
February 17, 2008 at 4:15 pm