From critical sociology to public intellectual: Pierre Bourdieu and politics

By the late 1990s, Pierre Bourdieu had become the primary public intellectual of major social scientific status at the head of the anti-globalization movement that emerged in France and in other Western European countries. This article discusses how Bourdieu became a leading public intellectual, a role that seems to contrast with his early years as a professional sociologist. It explores what seemed to change in Bourdieu’s activities and outlook as sociologist and what seems to have remained constant. It identifies several institutional conditions that seemed necessary for Bourdieu to be able to play the kind of public intellectual role he did in his later years. Bourdieu’s movement from a peripheral position to a central location in the French intellectual field, the changing character of the field itself, the growing influence of the mass media in French political and cultural life, the failures of the French Socialists in power, a cultural legacy of leading critical intellectuals in France, a unifying national issue of globalization, and the political conjuncture in 1995 all intersected in ways that opened a path for Bourdieu to choose new and more frequent forms of political action. His responses to that combination of factors at different moments reveal both a striking continuity in desire to preserve the autonomy of intellectual life and a change in view and strategy on how best to do that. The article concludes with a brief evaluation of Bourdieu’s public intellectual role.     

Framing Latina/o Immigration, Education, and Activism

Although Latinas/os have a long history in the USA and represent a growing percentage of the population, they remain largely invisible or stereotyped in dominant images and discourses. Such representations are often ahistorical, and they camouflage the effects of US power and inequality. However, the spring 2006 immigrant rights demonstrations disturbed dominant conceptions. The demonstrators called attention to the contradictory US practices that disrupt home countries, recruit labor migrants, and deny immigrants full participation. Likewise, the role of students in these demonstrations spurred reflections on why youth would walk out of their schools for immigrant rights. Inspired by these demonstrations, we combine materials from multiple disciplines to emphasize the significance of US imperialism, exploitation, and exclusion on Latina/o migration, education, and activism. Key to this article is a reframing of how the media, K-12 curriculum, and popular discourse often engage in a cultural cover-up that sustains inequality.     

Projective Identification as a Contributor to Domestic Violence

Many explanations have been given as to why men batter. Rarely are deep unconscious intrapsychic processes identified as contributing reasons. One way that violent men may use their partner to fill emotional needs is through the primitive defense of projective identification. Projective identification may be invoked by men to induce the other partner to carry split off threatening parts of the self that are too anxiety provoking to retain. The occurrence of projective identification could therefore be an important intrapsychic and interpersonal dynamic that contributes to the escalation of tension prior to the violent episode.     

The Gendered Face of Terrorism

What does sociology have to contribute to our understanding of terrorism? As scholars of gender and the Far Right, we believe that we have much to offer the current debates. In this article, we focus both on contemporary cases of terrorism, the attacks of September 11 and the Oklahoma City bombing, and terrorist movements as gendered: as enactments of masculinity. In particular, we focus on the contemporary white supremacist movement, the most dangerous domestic terrorist threat faced by the USA. We suggest that the ideology and organization of many terrorist groups are saturated with gendered meanings, both as the analytic prism through which they view their situation, and also as a means of political mobilization.     

Goodness of fit for the inverse Gaussian distribution

For testing the fit of the inverse Gaussian distribution with unknown parameters, the empirical distribution-function statistic A² is studied. Two procedures are followed in constructing the test statistic; they yield the same asymptotic distribution. In the first procedure the parameters in the distribution function are directly estimated, and in the second the distribution function is estimated by its Rao-Blackwell distribution estimator. A table is given for the asymptotic critical points of A². These are shown to depend only on the ratio of the unknown parameters. An analysis is provided of the effect of estimating the ratio to enter the table for A². This analysis enables the proposal of the complete operating procedure, which is sustained by a Monte Carlo study.     

Immigrants and alien workers

VII. Conclusion The number of immigrants now coming to the United States is proportionally only a fraction of the number that came in earlier years, and there is nothing in those numbers to suggest a difficult absorption burden. Immigrants, both legal and illegal, more than pay for the services they use with the taxes they pay, leaving a considerable net surplus that benefits American citizens. Immigrants raise productivity and do not cause an observable amount of unemployment of citizens. Admitting far more immigrants into the country than the law now allows would have positive effects on the incomes of citizens, and would enhance the continuing vitality of the United States.     

Campus attitudes toward alcohol and drugs in a deep southern university.

In our zeal to deal with alcohol and drug abuse, we may have a distorted picture of what the majority of college students actually think about alcohol and drug use. Students in this study done at a public university located in the Deep South report being generally intolerant of substance abuse.     

THE STRUCTURE OF FAMILY PARADIGMS: AN ANALYTICAL MODEL OF FAMILY VARIATION

The theory of family paradigms provides an integrative framework for under-standing and systematizing the diverse ways that families organize and make sense of family life. Using formal methods of analysis based on logical and geometrical arguments, the priecise implications of models of family types can be investigated and compared. The paradigmatic framework can thus be refined and extended to form a more rigorous theoretical grounding for family typologies is explored and a miltidimensional model is derived the geometry of which is equivalent to, but more succinctly captures, the underlying structure of uariation in family para-digms. In Part II, the resulting model is interpredtd and explored in terms of implications for family theory, theory construction, and family therapy. Clarifying the basic dimensions of the paradigmatic framework also permits more precise exploration of interrelationships among related models of family types, which can be understood as reduced models derivable from the complete geometry of the paradigmatic framework.     

Cognitive-behavioral-expressive interventions with aggressive and resistant youths.

Research into the nature of aggressive behavior in youths has demonstrated that these youths are often the victims of abuse, exhibit aggressive behavior in early childhood, and remain aggressive into young adulthood. The treatment approach described in this article is a modification of Monahan's [1981] model of the prediction of violent behavior and the anger-management approach of Novaco [1985], and integrates the developmental models of Piaget [1963] and Erikson [1959]. The program is a combination of cognitive, behavioral, and expressive therapies and is targeted to the reduction of dysfunctional cognitive, affective, behavioral, and problem-solving patterns of aggressive youths. As referrals of such aggressive clients are often involuntary, interventions with unwilling and resistant clients are also presented.