Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) was a leading figure in the Frankfurt School and one of this century's most demanding intellectuals. His works, always informed by his variant of Critical Theory that he called Negative Dialectics, is notoriously difficult to understand bu has had an enormous impact on philosophy, sociology, musicology, literary criticism, psychology, and the study of culture.
In an introductory section, Martin Jay gives a brief, lucid account of Adorno's notion of force-field, and of Adorno's extension of Walter Benjamin's concept of constellation. He distinguishes five impulses in Adorno's thinking: his Marxism, his aesthetic modernism, his mandarin cultural conservatism, his anticipation of deconstructionism, and the self-conscious Jewishness that led him to look for redemption and at the same time to refuse any definition of paradise.
Professor Jay devotes the central sections of his book to the major aspects of Adorno's thought--his philosophy, his social theory, and his view of modern culture and aesthetic theory. He has succeeded brilliantly in the task of presenting Adorno's theories in understandable form while remaining true to their unresolved tensions.
A highly readable introduction to and overview of the postwar social sciences in the United States, The Americanization of Social Science explores a critical period in the evolution of American sociology’s professional identity from the late 1940s through the early 1960s. David Paul Haney contends that during this time leading sociologists encouraged a professional secession from public engagement in the name of establishing the discipline’s scientific integrity.
According to Haney, influential practitioners encouraged a willful withdrawal from public sociology by separating their professional work from public life. He argues that this separation diminished sociologists’ capacity for conveying their findings to wider publics, especially given their ambivalence towards the mass media, as witnessed by the professional estrangement that scholars like David Riesman and C. Wright Mills experienced as their writing found receptive lay audiences. He argues further that this sense of professional insularity has inhibited sociology’s participation in the national discussion about social issues to the present day.
Authored by one of the most respected figures in the field of personal ethnographic narrative, this book serves as both a memoir and a sociological study, telling the story of one lesbian couple’s lifelong journey together.
Are You Two Sisters? is Susan Krieger’s candid, revealing, and engrossing memoir about the intimacies of a lesbian couple. Krieger explores how she and her partner confront both the inner challenges of their relationship and the invisibility of lesbian identity in the larger world.
Using a lively novelistic and autoethnographic approach that toggles back and forth in time, Krieger reflects on the evolution of her forty-year relationship. She describes building a life together, from sharing pets and travels to getting married. Are You Two Sisters? addresses not only questions of gender and sexuality, but also of disability, as Krieger explores how the couple adapts to her increasing blindness.
Krieger’s title comes from a question asked by a stranger outside a remote desert bar as she and her partner traveled in the Southwest. Her apprehension about answering that question suggests how, even after the legalization of gay marriage, lesbianism often remains hidden—an observation that makes Krieger’s poignant narrative all the more moving.
This biographical study of one of China's leading social scientists follows his history from birth until the present moment, and includes a bibliography of his books and articles. Trained in London under Malinowski, Fei Xiaotong achieved eminence in the 1930s and 1940s for his pioneering studies of Chinese peasant life and for his popular articles, which stirred a wide audience in China to an awareness of social and political problems. A non-Marxist who came to sympathize with the Communists, Fei was gradually constrained in his activities after the Revolution until, in the 1950s, a massive propaganda campaign vilified him as a bourgeois rightist intellectual. Almost twenty years of silence and disgrace followed. Only recently, following the death of Mao, has Fei suddenly reemerged as a leader in the effort to revitalize the social sciences in China.
The story of Fei's life told here is, in a sense, the story of Westernized intellectuals in China at a time of peasant revolution. His writings enunciate the views of a sensitive observer of Chinese and Western society during that period of dramatic change.
For most sociologists, their life’s work does not end with retirement. Many professors and practitioners continue to teach, publish, or explore related activities after leaving academia. They also connect with others in the field to lessen the isolation they sometimes feel outside the ivory tower or an applied work setting.
The editors and twenty contributors to the essential anthology Journeys in Sociology use a life-course perspective to address the role of sociology in their lives. The power of their personal experiences—during the Great Depression, World War II, or the student protests and social movements in the 1960s and ‘70s—magnify how and why social change prompted these men and women to study sociology. Moreover, all of the contributors include a discussion of their activities in retirement.
From Bob Perrucci, Tuck Green, and Wendell Bell, who write about issues of class, to Debra Kaufman and Elinore Lurie, who explain how gender played a role in their careers, the diverse entries in Journeys in Sociology provide a fascinating look at both the influence of their lives on the discipline and the discipline on these sociologists’ lives.
Contributors include: David J. Armor, Wendell Bell, Glen H. Elder, Jr., Henry W. Fischer, Janet Zollinger Giele, Charles S. (Tuck) Green, Peter Mandel Hall, Elizabeth Higginbotham, Debra Renee Kaufman, Corinne Kirchner, Elinore E. Lurie, Gary T. Marx, Robert Perrucci, Fred Pincus, Thomas Scheff, Arthur Shostak, David Simon, Natalie J. Sokoloff, Edward Tiryakian, Joyce E. Williams, and the editors.
Published in collaboration with the American Sociological Association Opportunities in Retirement Network.
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