Category Archives: academic

I Forgive You

July 23, 2009 – 7:44 am

I spent yesterday afternoon at a public dialogue on debt and forgiveness (in an age of excess) hosted by the students of a 400-level Communications course on dialogue and public issues. I initially was interested in attending based on some of the questions related to responsibility for the negative consequences of consumerism. However, it was the moral/theological dimension of the issue that became most interesting to me.

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Multitude

July 19, 2009 – 6:25 am

Colleagues and I just completed reading Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. We had all been seeing scads of references to this book and were quite keen on reading it. However, we were all rather underwhelmed by Hardt & Negri’s account of the emergent possibilities for global democracy.

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Subculture Theory

June 2, 2009 – 11:10 am

The second of my comprehensive exam definitional essays is about subculture theory, which is the core of the literature for my dissertation research. This area reviewed subculture theory in its Birmingham School and post-subcultures forms and also sources of theoretical extension.

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Mass and Individual in Consumer Society

June 2, 2009 – 10:28 am

The first of the two definition of field essays that I wrote for my comprehensive exams, this short piece outlines some of the debates, as I see them, concerning the social and cultural environment created by consumer capitalism. In particular, it focusses on the production and organization of individuals into markets and niche audiences.

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