Seminar Twelve: ‘Race’ and Natural Difference

‘Race’ relations and ethnic relations

It should be noted that the vast majority of scientists, genetic and social, agree that a naturally or biologically distinct category of ‘race’ does not exist. (Hannaford 1996) What this means is that humans populations cannot be placed into specific tight categories, with physical characteristics that correspond in a determined way to social, psychological or cultural characteristics.  However, beliefs in a biological reality called ‘race’ continue to take hold of many people’s imaginations, usually denoting to a fixed biological referent — an identity that self-identifies and other-identifies i.e. the Other is a distinct ‘race’ and simultaneously Us is another ‘race’. While such claims do not hold in scientific discourse, it is important to note that sociologists are more interested at looking at ‘race’ not as a biological referent (which has no foundation) but rather how claims and perceptions of ‘race’ to emerge in social contexts, that allow for claims of racial superiority to be constructed and recycled.

Seminar Eleven: Workshop on planning presentations and seminar participation

This seminar was a workshop on planning your presentations and how to get the most out of seminars.

1. Click here to download the presentation workshop slides
2. Click here to download the seminar workshop slides

Also for tips on planning presentations click here and here. Also for some ideas on seminar participation click here and here.

Seminar Ten: The underclass

There has also been much debate if an ‘underclass’ does indeed exist. Further, how would we define it in the first place – would it make sense to speak of an ‘underclass’?

Is there an underclass and how would we define it?

Before defining the term underclass, let us first historically root the idea of an underclass.  The conception of an underclass can be traced back to the Victorian period, rooted historically in the beginnings of mass urbanisation and industrialisation. At that time they were the dangerous classes, a class of people who were considered a threat to social order and safety. In the 19th century terms “such as ‘moral wretch’ , ‘degenerate poor’, ‘depraved nomad’, and ‘savage outcast’ all ultimately came to be incorporated under the umbrella term ‘dangerous class’ …” (Hayward & Yard 2006: 17) In the writings of Henry Mayhew (1851) we have the terms such as the ‘nomad’ who “is distinguished from the civilised man by his repugnance to regular and continous labour”.

Seminar Seven and Nine: Producing the self

Understanding and conceptualising the production of the self is at the very root and foundation of sociology. In previous seminars we looked at modernity, industrial & post-industrial societies, life in the city and so on. All these areas do play a part in the understanding  of how we can root changes, empirically, in different epochs. For example, considering how we understand social class in industrial Britain, grounds social class identities within a certain social formation. However, the idea of how people make sense of themselves, in relation to social factors, is a deeper question on how we understand the social itself. In other words, what is the dynamic that makes society possible in the first place. As you see this type of question transcends any attempt to ground social theory relative when explaining any given social phenomenon, hence all context specific theorising are based on some form of meta-theory, even if not acknowledged. What do we mean by meta-theory? Metatheorists engage in “the systematic study of the underlying structure of sociological theory” (Ritzer 2003: A-1). This seminar will look at how do we understand the self in relation to broader social forces.