Academic-ish

    The Weight of the World (1999), originally published as La Misère du Monde in 1993, is a book by Pierre Bourdieu and a team of collaborators. In the book, the authors discuss the lived realities of social division and suffering of the working class in contemporary France. With sixty-nine in-depth interviews, reduced to fifty-four in the English version, each chapter of the book engages with one of the interviews, introduced by an analysis executed by one of the sociologists. In its final chapter, titled Understanding , Bourdieu explains the reasoning behind the methodology used throughout the book. As I will highlight later, he focuses on notions of symbolic violence and reflexivity to defend the use of socioanalysis and the importance of proximity and familiarity between the interviewer and the interviewee. This essay will examine the extent to which his methodology is justified, and successful in delivering the results Bourdieu intends.    To carry out this a...

     The advent of the Internet has radically influenced how people communicate with one another. At the very least, the Internet has opened up new avenues for communication that transcend previously existing geographic and temporal barriers. Owing to the virtually unrestricted access to information they offer, online platforms make up new spaces for cultural creation and expansion (Hebdige, 2012). But in creating space for culture, online platforms are also spaces where the hegemony of certain cultural forms can be resisted. There is value in examining these online spaces, and the resistance they garner. Hence, in this essay I will be exploring #Corecore, an aesthetic based video trend that became popular through the social media platform TikTok, as it constitutes an example of the aforementioned avenues for resistance.    This essay will begin by exploring the phenomenon of corecore. This discussion will involve not only an in-depth description of the formu...

      Discontent with previous theories of gender, in 1987 Candace West and Don Zimmerman introduced the concept of “doing gender” in an article of the same name. In this paper, informed by ethnomethodology, they centre interaction as the place where gender is produced and reproduced. In doing this they defined gender as an “ongoing activity” and shifted focus from “matters internal to the individual” (West & Zimmerman, 1987). Since its publication, “Doing Gender” has inspired much academic production in the field of gender studies (Nentwich & Kelan, 2014), rendering it one of the most important contemporary pieces of this body of theory (Deutsch, 2007). However, some key aspects of the theory warrant re-examination. This essay will examine and critique West and Zimmerman’s conception of “doing gender”.    The first section of the essay will outline West and Zimmerman’s theory of doing gender. It will discuss the various bodies of work the authors draw...