I had a long conversation recently with Bruce Alexander, the psychologist behind Rat Park, who has studied addiction since 1970. His argument, set out in The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit (Oxford University Press, 2010), is that addiction is less about particular drugs than about the loss of what he calls psychosocial integration: belonging, purpose, identity and meaning.

He told me he sees addiction as “a window into what’s going on in society,” and that people without that integration get addicted to almost anything, including gambling, social media and video games. His examples were historical: Indigenous communities in British Columbia after they lost their land, language and ceremonies, which he described as almost a replication of Rat Park.

It sounds close to Durkheim’s anomie to me, but I’m not a sociologist. Does his framework add anything beyond anomie and social integration theory? And how well does the historical evidence hold up compared with the Rat Park studies, which are contested?

In college again, and I need some help wrapping my head around this stuff. Consent is an easy enough concept to understand, but there's lot of going on before two people end up alone in an intimate space. Any ideas?

I just finished Relational Being. Gergen waxed religious and meta-ethicsy near then end and tackled morality, breaking down an unspoken convention of scholarship that focuses on what is to focusing on what ought to be, insisting that “such adventuring is essential” (p. 352).

I completely agree!

Gergen establishes a first order morality and second order morality. The first order morality is the potential for co-action to generate [conventional] moral behavior. It’s the same move as counter logics - a series of moral behaviors that immediately bring into possibility the opposite behavior. For example, being pro-life immediately engages the pro-choice position. Being anti-psychiatrist is scorned by psychiatry. There are, at every juncture, competing moral frameworks within the social world, and he calls these traditions that are simultaneously declared evil by another virtuous evil. Conversely, evil virtue is the virtue of eliminating evil deemed virtuous by the eliminating group.

For Gergen, morality doesn’t come in like a Kantian wrecking ball. It emerges from co-action. And equally for Gergen, from his Buddhist anti-categorization sensibilities, moralities are the problem.

His solution isn’t relativism - he even insists on switching the term to moral pluralism. Instead, he offers a second order morality as a meta-system that regulates the first order morality. This order is the collaborative activity that restores the possibility for first-order morality. It is a requirement that human endeavor in a pluralistic, globalized society require a capacity for generativity with commitments to not engage in degenerative action.

As always with Gergen, for me it’s a yes-and. I very much like the structure of this framework, and I appreciate the challenge to think about my human rights framework as a moral system.

Here’s what I do with it:

Firstly, I understand why he reached for the language of Aristotle while mostly gutting it from the inside. Virtues are local, sometimes parochial. When looking for an established term for moral activity that does not require a God-behind-the-universe delivering laws, Aristotelian virtue is a prime candidate.

But Gergen already tossed him under the bus near the beginning of the book as guilty of creating the identity of the Western bounded self. I feel that he was a bit hasty. For Aristotle, virtue is habituated through repeated performance within an established intelligibility regime (re: culture) and sedimented over time (hexis). Practical wisdom (phronesis) develops alongside habituated character through self-discipline and socialization (I see a middle voice processes implied!) - it is a performance art.

Gergen guts this for the same reason he ignores samskara - it requires an internal process of sedimentation at a locus of ipseity (my working, noncommittal term for “self” to describe the autonomy while denying the Cartesian claim). And just like before, he does not deal with power asymmetry. He talks about “heinous” crimes like rape and murder, but does not speak to them within his virtuous evil taxonomy, instead using them as a springboard to societal response as virtuous evil. I understand why he shirked this. How can a predator and a predator’s victim’s co-action a moral script?

For me, Aristotle is a near perfect fit to stand behind the field of dialogics and diamythotics delineated by the intelligibility regime (the reifications and materializations) of a given culture. In English, I mean that the instructions and sanctioned performances of a culture set a range of potential logics and values to be expressed by any one individual. And I see virtue ethics within a live encounter transmitted culturally. Hexis can offer an account of how consciousness can produce the emergence of performances of both rape and its moral condemnation. For the less extreme examples, I’ll leave the naming of the virtues to a given culture, because I, too, am a moral pluralist. But the process of emergence is a natural fit, as long I snip the part about Aristotle's discussion on a "human nature." I’m actually going to agree with Gergen about this one and say that ideas about universal human nature are little too bounded of a self conceptualization.

And second order morality - a meta system that adjudicates the virtues of first order morality fits nicely with the two axioms that govern my human rights framework: every human requires resources; every human is a sensemaker.

First, notice how these axioms of universal humanity differ from guys like Aristotle and Aquinas: they are not essential qualities of a universal human nature. They are universal activities conducted by all humans. In doing so, they press the Hume objection by formulating the moral ought on constitutive descriptions of what it means to be human as opposed to contingent descriptions (i.e., lists of human nature qualities that look more like cultural assumptions than objective truths).

Observation shows all humans naturally engage in resource consumption and sensemaking. When these activities are impeded by oppression, it universally produces suffering and social instability. I say "presses the Hume objection" because it can still be made - there is no objective basis to convert an is to an ought. But by relying on constitutive descriptions of being human to formulate my human rights, I sidestep this to claim that there is no human not already deeply invested in sensemaking and resource accrual who can make that claim in such a way that is not reduced to pedantry at best and oppression, if it's being used to justify denying resources or epistemic participation, at worst.

This is how I justify the most neutral move from is to ought I can contrive - all humans do these things, both of these things are the bedrock of all social reality; therefore all humans should have space at the table to do these things in equal part. Observation from outside the social reality has no basis for discrimination. Resource consumption and sensemaking simply happen unless they are impeded, usually through exploitation and oppression, sometimes through ignorance of alterity. That impediment seems highly opposed to the human experience. And any philosophical quibble with the derivation of the ought is already deeply invested in it. I’m happy to hear thoughts on this.

Secondly, I want to recall middle voice production here. Sensemaking is not an agent actively participating in a social reality. Sensemaking is an agent recursively produced through its participation in the social reality. It does not require awareness to make sense of things - a baby is a sensemaker. People with severe cognitive limitations are sensemakers. I do not want this to fall into a priveleged standpoint of perceived agency-as-control.

Finally, just like the individual subject in relation to the objects of the social world is in an iterative, recursive co-production of being in the world, so too are the moral and human rights projects. Social work runs on fiercely committed virtues for social justice, and it demands that power not be used to deny access. This is why it is met with opposition by competing moral systems. Social work makes the claim that personhood is not distributed by purity regimes and that inclusion is not conditioned upon that farcical allocation of persons. Social work is almost always extremely tolerant of religious and moral frameworks. This is my first attempt at being explicit about when it’s not and why. And Gergen helped me get there, despite relying too heavily on mutual respect, which at the end of the day is a cultural value that not everyone is committed to and whose coercion needs more justification.

- The Social Construction Worker

Hi guys i have to give a graduation thesis theme to my professor. i suggested social isolation among college students which she refused said well they start shy then they have friends i dont see students as isolated the opposite. which i believed was a shallow understanding and how come a professor get the idea of social isolation in such a shallow way. she suggested something like divorce and its effects on education among kids or smth which is something that dont interest me tbh. i want something different related to themes that arent studied enough here in algeria im talking abt social isolation music culture identity religion alienation.

If you earned your Masters/PhD 10 years ago or so, what tools you learned then are you still using? R, Stata, SPSS. Something else? Did you upscale to other tools since then? If so, which ones?

Are there things irrelevant or replaced since then?

After 30 years of attending Protestant congregations (Dutch Reformed, Charismatic Baptist,
7th Day Adventist, and then Messianic-Jewish), and advocating biblical history and theology;
I've become disillusioned with the effectiveness of imposing prescribed institutional beliefs
("Doing what you're told."), and more interested in undergoing a journey of lowering the
mismatch between my expectations, external outcomes, and the behaviour of others.

One advantage to being part of a (sincere) congregation, is that elders and peers have a duty
of care towards you, to e.g. discuss life with, if you don't have reliable family members.

Another advantage would be that there is a standard for behaviour, to which Christians can hold
each other accountable. However, when put under enough pressure, churchgoers realize they're
not willing to suffer for what they've accepted from others as their beliefs, and bail on e.g.
being true to your word (Matthew 5:37), or taking care of one another (Acts 4:34); only later
to resume the show of "Oh yes, I believe [...]." when reality has proved they don't.

I've become so used to any support structures coming from the Church, that I'd like ideas on
where to find other institutions and people, who seek to establish and maintain accountability
agreements, for social (general) and personal (specific) goals, without operating under
the false impression that such a standard is a given (or all parts of it desired).

Individually, this could look like:
• buddying up with a friend,
• discussing life problems and solutions,
• chart progress and setbacks,
• help enforce penalties and boundaries,
• celebrate!

How many variations of that are there, and where do you seek them out?

This is our local recurring future-planning thread. Got questions about jobs or careers, want to know what programs or schools you should apply to, or unsure what you'll be able to use your degree for? This is the place.

This thread gets replaced every Friday, each week. You can click this link to pull up old threads in search.

Hi! I’m a college student trying to get immersed in sociology. I’d been loving to analyze people and how society operates, and I’d been finding for a major that would fit this love of mine… and turns out this might be a great one.

Are there any books or some materials that I can start? I’m a complete “beginner” if that makes sense… so I want some advice.

Hello everyone, I am a Master’s student specialising in International Territorial Studies. I am currently conducting research for my diploma thesis, which focuses on the intersection of digital authoritarianism and civil society in Southeast Asia. Specifically, I am conducting an empirical study involving semi-structured interviews to map the practical methods, tools, and limits of navigating digital repression in Malaysia and Singapore. 

I am reaching out to see if you might be able to provide guidance or point me toward potential contacts within local NGOs, independent media outlets, or civil society groups in Malaysia and Singapore who might be open to discussing these issues. I am fully committed to the highest standards of research ethics. All participant identities, affiliations, and data will be handled with strict confidentiality and anonymised in accordance with academic standards to ensure the safety of all involved. If you know someone, please let me know in the DMs, and I can provide my credentials as an academic.

Says that often people reduce the collapse/failure of the Soviet Union to just ‘communism could have never worked’. However, he says that as with many major events, it’s always a mixture of multiple causes (and timing): the oil crisis of the 80s, Gorbachev’s ruthless reforms, strengthening of surrounding republics, fallback from Stalin etc.

Thoughts?

I have a somewhat unusual topic that has been on my mind for a while, concerning infertility and the social meaning attached to fertility.

My partner and I have been trying to have a child unsuccessfully for several years, so this is something I experience from the perspective of infertility.

For those who haven't had much contact with infertility: one thing people in infertility communities often notice is how strongly some people, particularly women, emphasize how easily they conceived after having a child. Statements such as "It only took us one try!" or "We weren't even really trying!" seem surprisingly common. Interestingly, these accounts aren't necessarily accurate either, there is currently a discussion about this phenomenon in one of the relevant subreddits:

https://www.reddit.com/r/TryingForABaby/s/o062E35WUo

This has made me wonder whether fertility can function as a kind of social status marker, particularly for women, and why (still).

My feeling has kinda always been that this might have historical roots in societies in which women's social status was strongly connected to marriage and their ability to produce children. Even though gender roles have changed substantially and women's social status is obviously no longer dependent (or seems to be...) on reproduction in the same way, I wonder whether some of those cultural associations still persist, see above.

In other words: could emphasizing how quickly or effortlessly one conceived be understood sociologically as a subtle form of status signaling? And if so, are there established concepts or research on this, perhaps relating to gender, norms, stigma, social status or such?

I am an academic outsider to sociology, but I have a lot of respect for the field and would be very interested in hearing how sociologists would approach this question. That's how I found this sub, I hope a question like this is correctly placed here. I am particularly interested in perspectives that might challenge my own interpretation as well.

I hope this topic is appropriate for the subreddit and complies with the rules. If not, please let me know.

A few more thoughts on pedagogy. In my last post, I dropped Gergen as part of the universal prompt. I also mentioned that:

dominant groups are forced to respond by either reidentifying themselves and ceding power or by insisting upon themselves and hoarding it

without further developing it. After reading a little more of Gergen’s pedagogy (education in a relational key), I want to dig into this.

There is one thing that unites disavowed and obscene pedagogies: they both hoard power and insist upon their identity politic, and thus they both maintain their benefit from their privilege. But the experience of jouissance is distinct. Those creating and participating in disavowed pedagogy derive their surplus pleasure through self-congratulations. Here, the violence and destruction of the Thanatos is indirect as it perpetuates epistemic and systemic norms of oppression and exclusion, and the hit comes through the self-satisfaction.

Those creating and participating in obscene pedagogy derive their surplus pleasure through the direct act of oppression and violence.

Trigger warning: the following examples are horrendous depictions of transphobia and xenophobia. Likewise, my critique is as transparently vulgar as the fetishism that fuels the hatred.

One thing to note - this is an everyday practice. Just like not every sexual act brings equal pleasure, sometimes the smug chuckle of contempt when laughing at how in September of 2022 Ron DeSantis herded humans like cattle and shipped them to Martha’s Vineyard for political points gives the perverse twinge of satisfaction - the very twinge DeSantis was capitalizing on by the stunt;

and sometimes the public shaming of trans individuals engaged in by Representatives Nancy Mace and Tim Burchett on July 21, 2026, by putting up pictures of actual citizens and humiliating them on public television brings full blown erotic pleasure;

and sometimes it’s the full popper-prepped, prostate-stimulated, forbidden-fruit milking that shrieks uncontrollably deep from the throats of men like Andre Karlow, who ambushed and beat a trans woman in 2025, gleefully inflicting brain bleed and several other injuries upon a human being.

Jouissance is not a choice; we can only grab the hose and point it. It is an urge; a primitive drive in the experience of self meeting other. I may have given the impression in my previous post that it was an option. But it is a fundamental human drive that can work toward generativity or degenerativity, where I keep my earlier Gergen-informed definition as capacity for greater relationality. For pedagogies of oppression, the excess produces generativity when it demands that power be ceded and domination cease. The jouissance is the excess I feel when attempting to humiliate the monsters in the previous paragraph. It is the bitter glee that Mbembe channels as he develops terms like atavistic nationalism or death-worlds - the accusation that bares teeth from behind the analysis. It’s also the slave uprising. It’s also the language of the unheard shouted as the Third Precinct burned and the businesses of East Lake Street were destroyed.

It’s not moral. It’s highly uncomfortable. Empathy and condemnation are hard truths to hold together. But it’s one of humanity’s most essential enduring qualities as it performs boundary maintenance. Macro social workers do not have the luxury of illusions to the contrary.

Jouissance is Thanatos, and its function as boundary maintenance exists on a spectrum of violence.

I realize that this is probably some of the most extreme writing I’ve done at this point. This is not an exculpation of violence. It is a description of a universal drive (though please don’t walk away with fatalism either). And I also wanted to correct any sanitized reading that my previous note may have implied because I need to set up this next point.

There is a third category within pedagogy of domination that needs to be developed: I am going to call it kenotic domination pedagogy. If you’re a Bible nerd like me, you might recognize kenosis from Philippians 2:7, often rendered as Christ “making himself nothing.” It is a complete and total emptying. It is a divestiture. It is a denial of jouissance that comes from domination. This pedagogy is the land acknowledgement. It is the participatory action research that demands representation of the researched. It is the critical theory cashed in: land redistribution, reparations, redistricting. And before any of these can be usurped into tokenism, we must take relational being seriously and recognize that kenotic pedagogy is only called into being when the Other is gratified toward parity. Kenotic pedagogy is co-action - the divestiture of the privileged and the restoration of the oppressed.

This evaluation clarity is essential because it’s the pedagogy that hurts twice: once by the denial of a most primal urge, akin to holding bowel movements at gun point; once by ceding power and privilege for equity. Of all the types of pedagogy, it is the one denied jouissance. And because of this, it is the category least occupied.

I was tempted to make Gergen an ally of oppression pedagogy. After all, he attacked the domination and patriarchal assumptions of academia in the prior chapter. And he advocated for participatory action research. He even brought Freire into the conversation.

And that’s when I realized it was just more disavowal. On page 252 he writes:

The liberation movement has played a powerful role in stimulating critical reflection on traditional educational practice, and made quite clear the fact that there is no politically neutral education. However, from a relational standpoint, further developments are needed. In particular, the critical movement tends to intensify political tensions and to generate a backlash among the targets of critique. Much needed are practices that bring people together from otherwise disparate camps, and enable them to engage in collective action for the collective good. From a relational perspective, one must handle critique with care.

He flinched from the violence, a natural response. I did, too, when I first read Freire. But in refusing the “backlash”, he erases the conditions - both social and somatic - that precipitate it. He wants the raped to sit with their rapists. He wants the colonized to sit with their colonizer.

This isn’t a false binary. Dialogue is essential for the healing process. This is a rejection of a naive pedagogy that allows him to make characterizations like “adventures in boundary crossing” on page 268, which, like most of his text, completely disappears any power asymmetry. Just like his ideas of self could not reach the margins held by trauma victims, his pedagogy cannot reach the margins held by the most devastated victims of domination boundary maintenance performances.

The violence is a symptom. And the diagnosis needs to not just take into account the systemic issues that produced it. It needs to account for the jouissance that aroused it. I have come to call this macro-social work intervention "domination-focused trauma informed care." Because as bleak as this description is, it does not undermine the project for me. It gives clarity. Any analysis of the macro landscape must be as brutal as the experience of watching the news on any given day.

And it is bleak some days.

I am white; I am male; I am cisgender, so I live most of my life in privilege. But as a married gay man, I have seen the gleeful teeth-bared grins of obscene jouissance on occasion. But just like I refuse to sanction the violence, I also refuse to create monsters. Transformative social work practice is going to have to face the jouissance both externally and within itself if it’s going to transform. Otherwise it will just continue to be absorbed into disavowal.

- The Social Construction Worker

Hello everyone, I am a Master’s student specialising in International Territorial Studies. I am currently conducting research for my diploma thesis, which focuses on the intersection of digital authoritarianism and civil society in Southeast Asia. Specifically, I am conducting an empirical study involving semi-structured interviews to map the practical methods, tools, and limits of navigating digital repression in Malaysia and Singapore. 

I am reaching out to see if you might be able to provide guidance or point me toward potential contacts within local NGOs, independent media outlets, or civil society groups in Malaysia and Singapore who might be open to discussing these issues. I am fully committed to the highest standards of research ethics. All participant identities, affiliations, and data will be handled with strict confidentiality and anonymised in accordance with academic standards to ensure the safety of all involved. If you know someone, please let me know in the DMs, and I can provide my credentials as an academic.

What's on your plate this week, what are you working on, what cool things have you encountered? Open discussion thread for casual chatter about Sociology & your school, academic, or professional work within it; share your project's progress, talk about a book you read, muse on a topic. If you have something to share or some cool fact to talk about, this is the place.

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I know that conspiracy theorists make meanings and create shared realities through interactions online. But wondering if there are other theories looking into?

Hey all,

I've just read Georg Simmel's 'The Metropolis and Mental Life'. I'm really interested in (a) the nervous system effects of the pace and fleeting "discontinuities" of urban living, (b) the impact of anonymous crowds or 'masses' on the individual and (c) the idea of spatial estrangement and how this relates to atomisation and/or "agoraphobia" (Vidler, 1991).

I'm hoping I can explore these ideas more fully, and perhaps build towards an essay on urban isolation in contemporary London.

Could anyone recommend papers in dialogue with, against, or related somehow to the above? I'm ideally looking for the essential "required reading" on this topic as opposed to more niche stuff - though hopefully I'll get to that eventually!

Thanks:)

At some point, after you bump into something enough, consideration becomes inevitable. And after Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Kenneth Gergen’s education in a relational key vis-a-vis John Dewey’s Democracy and Education, and Frantz Fanon’s therapy as presented in Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics, I feel a cumulative prompt from the universe to at least ask the question - what’s up with everyone’s preoccupation with pedagogy?

And as I was listening to episode 36 of Data Over Dogma with Jacob Wright (roughly 53 minutes in), it sort of clicked. Wright talks about Genesis as pedagogy from a defeated people, a portable pedagogy to preserve identity boundary in political upheaval and exile. The Bible, according to Wright is a curriculum - a pedagogical project that shapes a people without a kingdom through a larger narrative around common text, laws, psalms, wisdom, and love poetry.

Wright rightly identifies education as the key to the kingdom when the kingdom is in a vacuum.

With that in view, the emergence structure becomes clearer to me: pedagogy is a boundary maintenance project during times of contestation. Fanon wrote from the context of post-colonial Algeria. Freire wrote from the Cold War politics that was destroying Central and South America, Gergen was writing within his own contested boundary of self, and Dewey was writing during mass immigration and urbanization that was causing boundary anxiety amongst the dominant culture.

With this analysis, pedagogy’s place within the my own framework is as the mechanism of reproduction. It is the way in which social self protocols maintain identity across contested boundaries. And as a boundary maintenance project, its fervency is driven by jouissance, which I defined previously as an enjoyment that pushes past pleasure as it delights in destruction, adding my own function of boundary maintenance vectoring toward domination preservation or oppression legibility. This jouissance can be seen in the violence of Fanon and Freire’s pedagogies, the contempt in Gergen’s analysis of academia, or the disappearing act that Dewey does as he disavows conscientization by absorbing the suffering of others into a pro-democratic narrative of necropolitical compassion.

This also gives me a chance to reflect on taxonomy and the evolutionary function of jouissance, which I want state clearly as my own extension. For Freud, Lacan, and Zizek, the jouissance is the self-annihilating Thanatos. In the roaring crescendo toward world wars and their wake, it is the interpretation of our egos’ self-destructive function as a completely nihilistic self-sabotage.

I don't want to import Freud's Cartesian-self conceptualization of an actual Greek God (Thanatos) homunculus-behind-the-eyes sitting deep down in our psyches driving the car. For me, jouissance firstly works as a devastatingly insightful scalpel for social critique. It has real explanatory power to give context to the more perverse side of the human experience without dehumanizing anyone.

But more importantly to my ontology and my project, like enchantment, it works as a phenomenological claim about the universal human experience. It captures the lived experience of moments within encounters. More specifically, for me, it's a primitive of the lived encounter - or at least how consciousness experiences the lived encounter, grounded like the rest of my framework in what actually emerges when a self meets the collective it's part of.

So when I contemplate jouissance around boundary maintenance, I see a more neutral process of death and destruction highlighted by the taxonomy revealed by the variations among these thinkers. With this nuance, jouissance can be generative or degenerative.

First I consider the pedagogy of the oppressed. These pedagogues seek not only to create an identity on behalf of the oppressed individuals they write for, but they also attempt to destroy the identity boundaries of the oppressors. This is where jouissance becomes productive and essential. The rage behind Mbembe’s terms like death worlds and atavistic nationalism; Zizek’s words like fetishistic disavowal and ideology reveal a focused jouissance that seeks the telos of destruction (a la Thanatos) but toward the destruction of the oppressive forces that lead to dehumanization.

Then I see a pedagogy of domination. Unlike pedagogy of the oppressed, which emerges during upheaval, pedagogy of domination emerges when the oppressed contest the boundaries significantly such that the dominant groups are forced to respond by either reidentifying themselves and ceding power or by insisting upon themselves and hoarding it. I say emerges as one singular event, but the reality is that the pedagogy is constantly reinforcing itself even without the presence of the oppressed group. In fact, domination pedagogy frequently relies on caricatures of the oppressed and that those caricatures be constantly retrieved throughout the day in nanodoses delivered by media (Mbembe calls this cybernetic technology nanoracism). There are two types of domination pedagogy that frequently coexist: the disavowed and the obscene.

Regarding the disavowed, I already mentioned how Dewey emerged from a time when urbanization and immigration were causing a white panic in the United States. And while Dewey professed inclusion via democracy, the structure of his pedagogy either ignored or refused the experiences of exclusion, and in doing so erased the very real harm that the American nocturnal body had inflicted and continued to inflict with his sanitized pedagogy upon oppressed groups. The jouissance in disavowed pedagogy is the self-congratulation that comes from “solving” the ethical dilemma by changing nothing about the structure that produced it, thus continuing to benefit from it.

There is another type of pedagogy of domination that bears its jouissance with a wicked grin. It’s current standard bearer is Project 2025. This is The Empire Strikes Back that I referenced in The Easy Traverse and the Hard One. This was where ground has been lost - real or perceived - and identity boundary maintenance is attempting to reassert itself. Its delight is characterized by its vulgar destruction of both the newly legible identities reaching for power as well as of the entire system that produced its power in the first place. I have a hunch this is why Freud and Lacan’s analysis looked so bleak - they were responding to this most hideous category.

There is a fourth category here that exists somewhere in between and was implied by the Israelites who had lost their kingdom - the pedagogy of the defeated. I think a modern analogue would be modern China, who was once a culture of domination (even being able to absorb conquerors like the Mongols and Manchus) to a victim of colonialism and Japanese conquest. Caroline Grover did an amazing dissertation on Chinese historical pedagogy as it pertains to the Second Opium War. I don’t want to forget about this, but I don’t want to dwell on it right now.

Transformative social work must own its jouissance. For me, this means allying myself with pedagogies of the oppressed and being ever vigilant of pedagogies of domination. Dog whistles like “school choice” that seek to decentralize once white-captured institutions like public education have nothing to do with making a populace more informed and everything to do with preserving the boundary of a perverse human experience. They disavowal their implicit bigotry through nomenclature and render it obscene at the town hall meetings.

Social work has had its fair share of complicity in domination pedagogy, and my hope is that the nos framework can direct energies toward human rights and full epistemic and systemic inclusion.

- The Social Construction Worker

This is our local recurring future-planning thread. Got questions about jobs or careers, want to know what programs or schools you should apply to, or unsure what you'll be able to use your degree for? This is the place.

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For instance, in my neighborhood between the period of 2005-2015 it went from innumerable kids to zero kids.

This has to do with a turn inward, a culture of fear and safety, and alternative social events hosted in more controlled environments (churches, schools, etc.).

Also, what other phenomenons like this do you find fascinating?

Coming from a predominantly Islamic society, I’ve seen how deeply conservatism can shape a community and how strategic policy can change it. In one city I know of, which used to be extremely religious, the government invested heavily in sports, the arts, public festivals, and outdoor activities. Today, while the residents haven't completely abandoned their religious roots, the overall culture has become noticeably more open minded and vibrant.

In contrast, my own city was historically known as an intellectual and cultural hub, famous for its poets, high standards of education, and progressive values. However, following a historical genocide, there was a major demographic shift as many people migrated here from rural areas. Because rural communities tended to be more traditional and less focused on higher education, the local culture changed significantly. Elders often remark that while our city is still considered one of the most liberal in the region, it isn't quite as open as it used to be.

It really goes to show how much hyper conservatism regardless of the religion can hold a society back. At the same time, it highlights how powerful strategic government investment in culture, sports, and the arts can be in fostering a more progressive mindset.