Tag: Bourdieu
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Usurping the ‘officialization effect’
Bourdieu series, post #2 Power tends to appear magical to those who have less of it, and mechanical to those who are accustomed to wielding it instrumentally. Different social groups are differently positioned within the larger ‘field of power’; each possessing a different measure of symbolic power and equipped to a greater or lesser extent…
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Bourdieu series (landing page)
I had the opportunity this past semester to take an intensive graduate seminar at Berkeley that focused on the works of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. The class was quite intensive, and aptly named “Bourdieu Bootcamp” by the instructor, Loïc Wacquant, from whom I learned volumes. Prior to this semester, the most I had ever read that was written…
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The moral imperative of strategies of universalization
Bourdieu series, post #1 And one is tempted to say, contrary to the moralists who insist on pure intentions, that it is good that it should be so. No one can any longer believe that history is guided by reason; and if reason, and also the universal, moves forward at all, it is perhaps because…
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chasing after vs. articulating ‘public opinion’
In The Symbolic Uses of Politics, Murray Edelman had this to say about public opinion polling: A related kind of ambiguity pervades political process as well: uncertainty about how much public support or opposition for programs exists or can be created. Because opinion is constructed and volatile, all indicators of it are problematic. Poll reports are…
Jonathan Matthew Smucker 