reading

In: Hoff, Walburga/ Miethe, Ingrid/ Bromberg, Kirstin (eds.): Forschungstraditionen der Sozialen Arbeit. Materialien, Zugänge Methoden (= Reihe: Rekonstruktive Forschung in der Sozialen Arbeit, Band 10). Verlag Barbara Budrich, pp. 53-68

In this essay I try to imagine the early F. Engels as sociologist and documentarist: walking through the streets of industrial Manchester; talking and listening to workers, families, beggars, factory owners, physicians, shopkeepers; reading and collecting reports, newspapers, letters. Besides its powerful language and its outrage, "The Condition of the Working Class" has a layer of subversive observational craft reminescent of a style of sociology developed in Chicago half a century later. This essay is part of a larger project.

In: Dorschky, Lilo/ Kurzke, Christian/ Schneider, Johanna (eds.): LernZeichen. (= Reihe: Dresdener Beiträge zu Bildung und Erziehung, Band 3) Budrich UniPress

This article reports on a small study my collegue Lilo Dorschky and I conducted in a literacy-project 2009-11. This study focuses so called vocational preparation programs in Germany (Berufsvorbereitungsjahr). These programs are based on the idea of cumulative compensation of several "eduational deficits" (which is promoted programmatic in educational policy). Since reading and writing skills of pupils in pedagocical and social science literature (as well as in mass media) recently were considered as bad and inadequate and schemes for literacy promotion were suggested, pupils at the same time are considered as often demotivated and disinterested in learning.

The aim of our study was to obtain an exemplary descriptive picture of the social context(s) of these programs in vocational schools (as far as this was possible in a small project with a lot of practial restrictions). Our central idea was to interpret these contexts as bundles of problems and contradictions not only for pupils, but also for teachers and social workers.

Our first finding concerns the perception of literacy skills. Although teachers percieve literacy skills of pupils as problematic, the same time they argue that for most pupils this is neither a serious problem nor a challenge in everyday life. The interpretation of these statements proved to be difficult since they refer to different dimensions: a perception of the pupils' lifes ("they don't need to read and write properly") as well as to their roles as teachers ("it is hard to teach them").

The second finding concerns the teachers. Since teachers are bound to structural restrictions they cannot overcome (for example that attending a vocational prep program is for pupils often merely an episode in a lasting career of supportive education; that pupils are constantly confronted with verbal and nonverbal suggestions about their "inferiority") teachers develop paradox strategies of coping with their own moral conflicts they face. These strategies consists - in the cases we noticed in our interviews and conversations - in maintaining the symbolic frame of "schooling" but at the same time in the tendency of denying their roles as teachers.

The result is a peculiar symmetry: pupils who do not want pupils to be anymore are confronted with teachers who do not want to be teachers...

Last year I started to use EMACS (Linux/ Unix Text Editor and working environment, usually a programmers thing) together with ORG-MODE, a task planner and note taking environment. At first sight, using such a geeky software seems not even practical for social scientists. But I like it pretty much, because it doesn't make any restrictions on how your planning-, scheduling- and note-taking style/behavior should look like, it doesnt suspend "paper and pencil work" for the sake of computerization. There are lots of tutorials describing individual setups of org-mode for a wide range of planning tasks and time management. From an ethnographic point of view these tutorials are interesting, because they contain implicit premises and descriptions of what "doing work" is all about. So I got the idea, that it should be possible to derive a setup for organizing work related to qualitative research processes (I dont like any of these suggestive programs like MaxQDA). When I got more used to EMACS/org mode I will try to find such a setup that makes sense to me (integrating diary, field-notes, memo-writing, developing of concepts and the like) and write a small report here.

I was surprised to stumble upon "Sociology through Science Fiction" (which I finally got today), a collection of SF-Stories (Miller Jr., Bradbury, to name some famous writers) that have been selected for their sociological imagination. For this purpose "science fiction is particularly well suited. The questions science fiction writers ask are not about one social world, but about countless possible social worlds. As models, the societies described in science fiction can generate serious inquiry into the nature of contemporary social reality. That is, they provide starting points for constructing hypotheses about the present. As models, they should be judged not in terms of whether they are true or false representations about current reality but, rather, in terms of whether they provide useful insights into social patterns and structures in which we are interested ...". The book is organized in sections of classic sociological concepts such as "social organization and culture", "self and society", "social differentiation" or "population and urban life". I am glad to have found it, not least because it presents the matter in form of an introductory textbook. The seriousness is not always on the side of science ...

Sociology through Science Fiction, edited by John W. Milstead, Martin Harry Greenberg, Joseph D. Olander and Patricia Warrik. New York: St. Martins Press 1974.

An essential element in science fiction is to refer to obscure and less obscure theories of the natural sciences or - probably more often - to invent them (in comments about the functioning of future technologies and the like). Since I like science fiction (besides being sf) for its incidental sociological imagery (which doesn't mean necessarily the subgenre of "social science fiction"), I started a collection of quotes from novels which make fun of social science concepts.

So here is the list.

... and definitly visit this page!