Dear SOAN students,

I hope that your first week of classes has gone very well and that you are settling into a challenging but rewarding and fun semester of scholarship.  If you are studying off-campus this semester, I wish you the best during your time away from Colgate—please send us a postcard!  I’m writing with some information to help you make the most of SOAN opportunities and events in the Spring 2015 term.  Please read on…

SOAN Faculty

After a fall term with several faculty leaves, we welcome back most of our SOAN professors this semester, although Prof Aveni and Prof Loe are away this term.  We also have our visiting faculty, Professor Joe Gibbons and Professor Lavinia Nicolae with us again this semester, and each is offering some great new courses, including offerings in medical anthropology and social deviance that we have not been able to offer for several years.

Some of you may also know that Professor Rhonda Levine is making retirement plans—after 33 years of inspiring Colgate students, this semester will be Prof Levine’s last semester of teaching!  I hope you will give Prof Levine your best wishes as she transitions to a new stage of the life course (as sociologists might see it…).

SOAN Jokes

Last semester I wrote about the new look of the SOAN Resource Room, and I hope that you have had a chance to visit and work in the new space.  If you’ve walked past the white board, you may have noticed some SOAN-themed jokes that students and faculty posted last semester.  The jokes are really bad, and I mean that in the best possible way.  Thanks to those who have posted jokes (I know that there is one student in particular that has been responsible for many of them so far), and make sure to stop by to see anything new that pops up.

an example of SOAN humor

SOAN Events – Spring 2015

In the spring term we are continuing our calendar of events on the theme of “Social Movements and Civil Rights,” building on the programming and events of last semester.  If the recent national and global examples of social movements didn’t seem real enough to you, last semester’s movements at Colgate brought home to us the importance of understanding social movements as important methods of social change.  I hope you will join us for two key lectures sponsored by SOAN this term—the lectures will be held on February 12 and April 8, and you can see more details below.  In addition, we are continuing many of the same community-building events that we have offered in past semesters—including happy hours and Cho-Dunkin’ Tuesdays!  Please check the weekly news and events emails that we will send throughout the semester for more details about coming events.  Here is a list of some of our keys events for the fall term:

Thursday, February 5, 11:30am-12:30pm: Information session for prospective SOAN majors.  Alumni 431/432; lunch served.

Tuesday, February 10, 8:15am-noon: Cho-Dunkin’ Tuesday; yogurt and donuts served in the SOAN lounge.

Thursday, February 12, 4:15pm: Roberto Velez lecture: “Of Art and other Visualizations: Examination of Visual Performances in the Vieques Movement.”  Persson Auditorium.

Thursday, February 19, 4:30-6:30pm: SOAN Happy Hour and celebration of National Anthropology Day!  Donovan’s Pub.

Tuesday, March 10, 8:15am-noon: Cho-Dunkin’ Tuesday; yogurt and donuts served in the SOAN lounge.

Friday, March 27, 5pm: Film: THIS IS SPINAL TAP—special 31st anniversary screening in conjunction with the Friday Night Film series.  Golden Auditorium, Little Hall; Pizza.

Wednesday, April 8 4:30pm: Kate Crehan lecture: “Creating Common Sense: A Gramscian Reading of the Tea Party and Occupy.” Persson Auditorium.

Tuesday, April 14, 8:15am-noon: Cho-Dunkin’ Tuesday; yogurt and donuts served in the SOAN lounge.

Thursday, April 16, 4:30-6:30pm: SOAN Happy Hour; Donovan’s Pub.

Tuesday, May 5, 8:15am-noon: Cho-Dunkin’ Tuesday; yogurt and donuts served in the SOAN lounge.

Keeping Up With SOAN News

SOAN implemented a few ways to keep up with SOAN news and events last year that we will continue this term:

(1) Weekly SOAN email updates—please don’t just hit DELETE!  These updates are quick and have a lot of good information in them.

(2) The SOAN Blog: http://blogs.colgate.edu/sociology-and-anthropology.

(3) The SOAN Opportunities Tumblr: http://soan-colgate.tumblr.com/.

I wish you all the very best in your courses and other campus activities this semester.  Please stop by and say “hi” some time this semester—my office is in Alumni 419.

Sincerely,

Chris Henke

Chair, SOAN Department

chenke@colgate.edu

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Students in Professor Levine’s Fall 2014 course on “Power, Racism, and Privilege” tackled last semester’s events related to race and civil rights via a class Tumblr page.

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Students in Professor Gibbons’ Fall 2014 Urban Sociology course took time to study two neighborhoods in Albany, New York as part of a semester long class assignment. Students used the mobile app Fieldnotes LT to document all of the storefronts, piles of trash, and homes with broken/boarded windows they found in the Albany neighborhoods of Arbor Hill and Center Square.  Using Google Earth, students then analyzed what they collected, along with city crime data and Census data, to explore if neighborhood crime relates to social disorder.  Some students used this data to call to question the validity of the ‘Broken Windows’ approach to policing, argued by some scholarship to have influenced the deadly police encounters in Ferguson and New York City.  This mindset emphasizes that cracking down on minor disorders like broken windows or large amounts of trash on streets can offset more serious crimes like assaults or murders.  Student projects demonstrated that the location of homes with broken windows on a block did not overlap with clusters of more serious crimes.  Supporting this, other student papers suggest that instances of both minor disorders and crime are instead tied to larger issues of structural disadvantage, like racial segregation.  While collecting data, students encountered a variety of people in these different neighborhoods, offering them a deeper sense of how community order manifests on the ground.  

submitted by Professor Joe Gibbons

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When I teach my Globalization and Culture class, many of my students assume that globalization is the spread of Western culture, or even specifically of American culture. There’s certainly a good reason to believe that in a world where Starbucks, Transformers, and Beyonce appear to have achieved global domination.

But the Chinese have become so obsessed with pop culture coming from a foreign country that even the government is concerned, and the source of the problem is not coming from the West. Instead, it’s the “Korean Wave” (Hallyu). It started with soap operas, but now Chinese consumers are also infatuated with k-pop, Korean fashion designers, Korean movies, Korean food, and even Korean products.  One member of the Chinese National People’s Congress moaned, “It’s more than just a Korean soap opera. It hurts our cultural dignity.”

According to “A Korean Hallyu Threatens American Cultural Dominance,” by sociologists Sangyoub Park and Lisa Wade, popular culture isn’t trivial. The issue is national soft power: “This is the kind of power states can exert simply by being popular and well-liked. This enables the country to influence transnational politics without force or coercion.”

Professor Carolyn Hsu

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