Suchergebnisse

This reflective essay describes and discusses numerous nudges Lyman Tower Sargent has given me during our interactions, dotting a timeline from my first Society for Utopian Studies conference in Memphis in the late 1990s through a recent e-mail about a conference on food utopias at Porto in April 2019. These moments—linked by their impact upon me—speak to his exemplary behaviors with both quantity and quality of scholarship. In the fields of communal as well as literary utopias, in genres as distinct as book reviews are from bibliographies, in providing definitions and classifications for others in the field, and finally, by demonstrating an openness to new ideas and to younger scholars, Sargent has influence that reaches far wider than anyone first touched by his gentle nudges would ever suspect. I am fortunate to have been one of those recipients.

A recent paper by Madden used concentration indices to examine the bases of party support in Ireland in the 2011 election. This note updates this work to incorporate the 2016 election using the latest wave of ESS data. The results show that in terms of the bases of party supports many of the features of the "earthquake election" of 2011 remain, in particular the widely differing support bases for Fine Gael and Sinn Fein. Concentration indices with respect to income show little change from the 2011 election. However, there is some evidence that the support base for Fianna Fail in 2016 was older and less well-educated than in 2011, with the change in support base for Fine Gael over the same period a mirror image.

Conversations about the state of higher education in the US are increasingly attuned to the predatory practices of for-profit colleges. The essay offers a critical retrospective engagement with my experience teaching at a for-profit institution of higher education. It provides a theorization of what I found to be a "customer service orientation"--a distinctive expectation the college has about how instructors interact with their students, as well as a skill instructors are asked to foster in students. After briefly outlining the institution's spatial configuration and how that supports its customer service orientation, I focus on two aspects of the for-profit educational experience: 1) the classroom experience within a generic sociology course, where students and I worked against the customer service orientation; and 2) a close reading of a course textbook assigned to all incoming students, which reveals most clearly the dual operations of neoliberal individualism and a customer service orientation. The classroom scenes detailed in this essay depict the complex and calculated negotiations of teachers and students with academic capitalism.