Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: THE MATRIX film trilogy communicates the insight into social theory needed to lure the sociologist into the subjective, cathartic experience of its symbolic content. “Matrix” is the Latin word for “womb, In the movie, THE MATRIX, it takes the form of an iron clad structure that molds and regulates all spheres of human life. As the story unfolds, however, the matrix is exposed as the system that must undergo radical reconstruction. At the metaphorical level, the matrix most closely resembles the media, and, insofar as the media is the site at which the film-makers envision social change, the media may well be the conceptual womb of revolution. The film-makers project the conviction that the cultural norms projected by visual media can be re-envisioned on the screen to reflect the embrace of more inclusive and rational norms by a deliberatively democratic public. The film attains the depth of focus to draw viewers into critical reflection not only on the global dimensions of socio-political conflict, but also on the entertainment industry’s politically hegemonic effect on undiscerning mass audiences. As we elaborate, the trilogy illuminates, aesthetically rational insights on social science and the normative fabric in which science as a social endeavor is embedded. Our aim is to consider how we might diminish the tension between the linguistic communication and the ocularcentrism that prevails in traditionally modern concepts of public discourse by viewing an inspiring film media that invite thought and deliberation within the public terrain of visual images.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Gerhard Lenski is widely acknowledged as one of the giants of modern stratification theory (see Barnett 2004 for an overview of Lenski’s place in modern sociological theory), but more often than not, he is also seen as irrelevant to current feminist theories of inequality, particularly as reflected in the relative lack of citations to his work on gender inequality and race, gender, class (RGC) intersectionality. This dual reputation of historical importance and contemporary irrelevance rests on two separate streams of Lenski’s scholarship: (1) Lenski's theory of “status crystallization” and “status inconsistency,”which explains status ranking in multidimensional stratification systems on individual political and other behavior; and (2) Lenski’s comprehensive evolutionary theory of stratification presented in Power and Privilege (1966; 1984), Human Societies (1970-2006), and Ecological-Evolutionary Theory (2005), which present his macro level theory and research on variation in societal level distribution systems with patterns of inequality correlated with the generation of surplus. However, neither Lenski’s mico or macro level theories and research beginning in the 1950s and 1960s has been explicitly viewed by feminist scholars or integrative race, gender, class scholars of the 1980s and 1990s as an embodiment of “multidimensionality” or “intersectionality” in explanations of inequality. Only recently have a few scholars suggested that Lenski’s theories lay a foundation for powerful models of inequality based on the intersections of race-class-gender and other statuses generating variation in power and privilege that developed in the 1990s and are prevalent today (Barnett 2004a, Tickamyer 2004). In this paper, we: (a) analyze Lenski's contributions to the study of social stratification and social inequalities at both macro and micro levels; (b) consider Lenski’s major ideas for understanding gender inequality and their relevance to feminist sociological analysis; and ( c) trace Lenski’s work in the 1950s and 1960s, especially his work on “status inconsistency” and status crystallization,” as a significant precursor of the race, gender, class “intersectionality” theories and research in the 1980s and 1990s that view systems of domination and subordination as determined by the intersections of race, class, gender (RGC) and other relevant socially constructed identities and locations (Andersen 1993; Baca Zinn and Dill 1994; Barnett 1993, 1995; Brewer 1993; Chow 1987; Collins 1986, 2000; Dill 1979, 1983; Gilkes 1980, 1988 ; Glenn 1999; Higginbotham 1988, Henderson and Tickamyer 2006; King 1988) and the development of RGC as an officially recognized subfield in sociology, thus the continuing relevance of Lenski’s work from 1954 to present times.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The Matrix organizes affect. It articulates knowledge, feelings, beliefs, practices, gestures, desires, longings, colors, noises, odors, and textures. It paints the sense of the world of adolescence and the sense(s) to facilitate moving around in that world. It produces an effective terrain that can be occupied by what I call the adolescent body. Watching The Matrix is to become that body in those sensations, and through those sensations a very particular space is organized within which that body moves. The "rubics" of the adolescent terrain are characterized as 1) lost and found; flat and deep, 2) learning with eyes closed, 3) what the body feels, and 4) the color of love.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This work provides, among other things, a current, up to date reference table listing groundwater doctrines in all 50 US states, which fills a gap in existing literature.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: 1. Argument

This paper explains the phenomenon of institutional self-mirroring by virtue of which institutions reinforce and reproduce themselves within/without our mind. I argue that we have institutions because institutions have us. We are instituted/institutionalizing subjects who institutionalize the life world as an object to be known because we are instituted into it.

2. A Phenomenology of Institutions

Institutions are the primary parenthesizing mechanism. Through institutional enunciations, particular aspects of otherwise ‘uncharted’ realities within/without are accentuated and tracked. Order is produced within/without to reduce uncertainty. Other uncontrollable residues will have been bracketed-out until they are controllable and knowable. Institutions may be defined as intersubjectively convinced ways of self-consciously/unconsciously programmed suspension, by means of which preferred or chosen sets of prefigured social conditions are selectively and procedurally actualized in a predictable and routine manner. The most infrastructural and originary institutions are the object-subject demarcation and their relations. On their grounds, all socio-political superstructures can be constituted because construction needs the constructor and the constructed as a precondition.

3. Socialization of the Mind

As a result of most actors’ correspondingly congruent behavioral and mental orientations, certain collective regularities are generated and orchestrated in a naturally stable way. At least, in terms of our world picture, we have such a solidly and securely objectifiable and knowable world. Institutional routinization processes pattern the wild realities into a naturalized ‘taken-for-granted’ world into which we are born and habituated. While institutions are embodied through lived experience, they also are internalized in our minds. The mapped mind is the social product.

4. Enframing

Interpretation is possible only when it is institutional. To know something presupposes a subject who can know and an object to be known. Both must be institutionalized to become sufficiently predictable and defragmented. We must be equipped with objectifying procedures which can officially and legitimately transform the uncertain into the certain. The originary institution of object-subject relations paves the way for human cognitive and interpretive activities. In this sense, our epistemological self is doubly enframed cognitively as well as experientially. This is because social institutions themselves, in which we participate to be socially meaningful actors in an everyday routine manner, are enframed by the very originary institution of the object-subject relations. Institutions can be interpretable objectively as much as interpretation is institutionalized.

5. Institutional Matrix

Institutions are internalized. They are subjectivated. Institutions within our mind are simultaneously externalized without by our social activities. Institution is the mind objectivated. In an ideal-typically constructed institutional life world, we are cognitively as well as experientially caught in a self-weaving net of institutional self-mirroring. The matrix is self-enclosed/enclosing.