1 1 Who are Europeans? When I went to Loughborough for the first time I was pleasantly surprised as a social scientist to see that the town was twinned with Épinal, the French town where the founder of modern sociology, Émile Durkheim, was born. In fact, as you enter any major English town you are likely to see sooner or later a plaque indicating that the town is twinned with another European town. But what is the meaning of this practice? After the Second World War, which pitched European state against Eur
1.4.1 Discourse involves work If discourse is doing something rather than doing nothing, what kinds of things are being done? We can see that Diana's account in Extract 1, like all accounts, constructs a version of social reality. When we talk we have open to us multiple possibilities for characterizing ourselves and events. Indeed, there are many ways Diana could have answered Bashir's first question in the extract above. Any one description competes with a range of alternatives and indeed some of these alternativ
8.1.1 What kind of evidence has been used in this course? We have used personal stories as evidence to support arguments about the mutual constitution of personal lives and social policy. The people in our stories all came to, or stayed in, the UK primarily because they saw it as a place of safety, not because of the welfare benefits or services they hoped to receive, and we have contrasted this with dominant discourses about (bogus) asylum seekers for whom welfare in the UK is said to act as a magnet. These dominant or official discourses, echoed b
5.3. 1 What would you include in such a test? An advisory group which drew up proposals for the new ‘Life in the United Kingdom’ naturalisation test, believed that the ‘two senses of “citizenship”, as legal naturalisation and as participation in public life, should support each other. In what has long been a multicultural society, new citizens should be equipped to be active citizens’ (Home Office Immigration and Nationality Directorate, 2003, Section 2). Although they claimed that becoming British ‘does not mean assi
Acknowledgements Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this course: The content acknowledged below is Proprietary and used under licence (not subject to Creative Commons licence). See Terms and Conditions. These extracts are taken from DD208 © 2008 The Open University. Course image: Michelle in Flickr
5 Further reading For further discussion and explanations of events in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, G. Squires and C. Hartman's (eds) There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster (2006, Routledge) brings together a series of social sciences essays and commentaries around different dimensions of the disaster. There are many books and studies detailing the evolution of council estates in Britain and focusing on the many problems facing some of the residents who live in them. Tony Par
3.1 The idea of problematic places Katrina offers us a rich case study through which we have begun to explore some of the concerns surroundng problem places or populations. In reflecting on the controversies that emerged in the aftermath of Katrina, we can see that for some commentators it was a ‘problem place’ long before the hurricane struck in 2005. The idea that different places can be seen as problematic is a recurring theme that emerges in the context of ongoing debates around poverty and inequality, and the relation
2.1 The shaming of America I begin our story with a case study relating to one of the most momentous episodes of environmental catastrophe in the early 2000s, Hurricane Katrina. On 29 August 2005, Katrina, a category 5 hurricane with 290 kph winds, hit the Gulf of Mexico coast of the southern USA, bearing down on the state of Louisiana and in particular on its main city, New Orleans (Author(s):
3 How to reflect on your learning It is important to get into the habit of actively reflecting on your learning. This is an important skill in its own right, and will help you get the most from your study time. So, as you work though each video, we suggest that when you are writing your Learning Journal you focus your thoughts and structure your notes around three areas: 1 The process of learning from the video For example, you might ask yourself: How do I feel about
Introduction This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course DD208 Welfare, crime and society.
References 4.1 Family and meanings? We have considered the difficulties of pinning down family definitions and meanings. We now ask whether it is indeed important to explore and unravel these complexities. Do the varieties of family meanings – or the meaning of ‘family’ itself – matter, or do they just provide a minor intellectual diversion? You may like to pause here for a moment to consider how you would answer this question for yourself. Do you think they matter, and if so, in what ways? We consider this questi 1.4 Structures of power & inequalities At the same time, such judgements and responses are not just personal matters: they are also embedded in all sorts of wider and interpersonal processes of power and inequality. These processes shape social policies, professional interventions, and representations in the media, as well as underpinning everyday social interactions in family lives and relationships. If we focus on family meanings, we may not always put issues of power, material inequalities, and moral evaluations at the centre o Acknowledgements The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions) and is used under licence. Course image: Bill Dickinson in Flickr made available under Author(s): References Keep on learning There are more than 800 courses on OpenLearn for you t 3.1 Claims about crime Definitions beg questions. So do social narratives and stories. Again, we need, as social scientists, to begin with an analytical task. What are the key claims that are being made in the common-sense story of the problem of crime? What are the core arguments that hold the whole thing together? There are a number of these, but two seem to be particularly important.
Claim 1: UK society in the immediate 2.5 Looking ahead: understanding economic change Section 2 has looked at different ways of understanding the new economy, of understanding what is actually happening. Look back over the different understandings of the new economy. Is there really a n 6 Conclusion As you moved through the various techniques we can use to analyse media texts in Sections 2 to Section 4, you should have discovered how rich even the simplest text can be in its drawing on political, social and cultural meanings discernible by close attention. Textual analysis enables you to register and negotiate the polysemy of texts and to see how the preferred reading is not the only one available. The preferred reading may be given prominence, however, by anchoring or by the genre chose Introduction The material presented here raises general themes of order and disorder, the way they are represented or signified, and the place of crime in these representations. The material is based upon an audio file, originally 29 minutes in length, and examines the problem of crime in relation to the city of Glasgow. It was recorded in 1999. This OpenLearn course provides a sample of Level 2 study in Author(s):
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Question 1
