Perspectives on Sex Work: A Past Paper

As promised ages ago, here’s a paper on the topic of conflicting perspectives on sex work that I wrote for Teela Sanders’ course on Globalization and the Sex Trade at Leeds. Looking back, it’s probably a bit trite and glosses over some of the subtleties of the topic, so that might have contributed to my rejection from a variety of schools (this was my writing sample).

Legend of Merton III: Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

1. Yes, that’s Robert Merton firing lasers out of his spectacles.

2. Yes, this image is designed to appeal to that narrow segment of the population who is both familiar with the conventions of electronic role-playing games and mid-20th century sociological theory.

3. No, I don’t really buy into Merton’s theory of deviance.

4. Yes, I once wanted to be an artist. Looks like I made the right choice!

Kicked in the Head by Contingency

It may be that the best response to an unpredictable environment is to vary one’s actions and put out as much variety as possible until something “clicks”. That said, I feel somewhat foolish about having spent so much money on applications to grad schools recently. Speed of rejection seems to correlate fairly well with “quality” of school, with Harvard, UCLA, Stanford, Wisconsin and Berkeley all firing off “thanks, but no thanks” letters pretty quickly.

Right now, I’m in some kind of strange limbo — having gained acceptance to an MA program at the school I’m at now, and still waiting to hear on a few other places I’d rather go (if only they’d pay me — thanks a lot, Washington). No doubt I’ve been placed on waiting lists, meaning that I’m waiting to see if the first-choice people decline their offers, at which point the schools have to look for someone else.

Needless to say all this makes putting forth a good effort in one’s last month of one’s last year of one’s degree somewhat difficult. The hardest thing is that This Does Not Fit The Pattern. History has not taught me to fail well.

Perhaps if I’d created a hierarchical linear model predicting of my chances of getting in, I’d be less disappointed.

Equilibrium Decadence and the Failure of Macroeconomics

Justin Wolfers posts over at Freakonomics about a new study which calls out macroeconomists on their adherence to models which may not be very predictive at all. As a professor of mine noted, sociologists are dealing with the exact same issue, but since economists are held in much higher esteem, they have a lot further to fall.

My feeling is that the financial crisis has inspired a lot of popular rage against macroeconomists, but whether this will contribute to any substantial rethinking of the discipline or simply be dismissed as the raving of an uninformed public remains to be seen. Wolfers seems cautiously optimistic, holding that salvation rests in the refinement of current techniques.

Of course, I’m not an economist, but I’m not convinced that equilibrium models and assumptions of rationality are working so well these days. Perhaps these assumptions will be revised in the wake of this crisis, perhaps not. Sociology does not have a similar “opportunity” to fail, so it will likely be harder to shake out of its sleepwalking.

An Original Piece

Naming the Crisis

From Wikipedia, on World War I:

Before World War II, the war was also known as The Great War, The World War, The War to End All Wars, The Kaiser’s War, The War of the Nations and The War in Europe. In France and Belgium it was sometimes referred to as La Guerre du Droit (the War for Justice) or La Guerre Pour la Civilisation / de Oorlog tot de Beschaving (the War to Preserve Civilization), especially on medals and commemorative monuments.

It’s not my idea, but who’s up for naming “the crisis” Depression II, and thus renaming The Great Depression to Depression I? At the very least, it will make for interesting discussion on the importance of language with regards to perception of major economic and political events, like that brought on by the technical difference between “depression” and “recession”.

Appearance and Nationality in Cuba

Funny I should post about race just before heading off to Cuba for the reading week holiday, since the trip gave me a look into the same issues from another angle. Staying at a resort alongside mostly elderly vacationers (whom I was very tempted to “type” in a particular way) drew some interesting comments. For example, the following exchange occurred when we struck up a conversation on our way to dinner.

CANADIAN SENIORS: “So, are you students?”

US: “Yep.”

CS: “Oh, where are you from? It must be Japan…wait, some of you are Chinese. Well?”

US: “Most of us are Chinese actually, one is Filipino.”

CS: “Oh, and he’s white!”

ME: “I’m Korean.”

CS: “Haha, he says he’s Korean!”

Discussing it after, we jokingly remarked that I didn’t “get a country” by dint of being white with no discernible accent. Similar exchanges occurred during the trip, mostly between the resort staff and our group. One of my friends was referred to as “Jackie Chan” repeatedly, and another staff member jumped into martial arts positions whenever we passed. She also told us that she knew everyone was Chinese except for myself and my Filipino friend. She knew this, she claimed, because of his eyes, which were different, as she demonstrated with the “slanty eye” gesture.

During much of the trip, I tried to claim I was Chinese by adoption, although this was mostly in an attempt to feign lack of understanding of languages other than Mandarin when we were being harangued by “tour guides” wanting tips. Just like my claiming to be Korean, nobody bought it.

I think the reaction from the tourists is particularly interesting because they were Canadians and knew we were as well (most if not all of those at the resort were from Canada). I wonder whether they would have asked similar questions if we had, for whatever reason, had the same conversation in Canada. As well, their insistence on knowing that people were Japanese got me thinking about this trend, which I’ve seen before. For whatever reason, in my experience it seems to have become unfashionable to ask people if they are Chinese. One of my friends mentioned that he thinks it’s because it’s no longer acceptable to “assume” anyone is Chinese, and that other well known countries (Korea, Japan) are more acceptable. Has anyone else noticed this? Why do you think this is?

Continuing Thoughts on Privilege

As a person with a Southern Ontario accent and white skin, when my answer to “Where are you from?” is Toronto (or Hamilton, perhaps, if the interlocutor is from Western Canada) nobody will respond, “no, I mean originally.”

Another Enlightening Trip into Theory Issues

Problem: what’s a cause?

Despite probably sounding like I am veering into banal high school philosophy here, it’s an honest question. The search for causal factors in social science is rarely questioned. Working assumptions in much research are that we will hypothesize a relationship (informed by some kind of theory) then use statistical techniques to evaluate a sample and determine whether we can prove our initial hypotheses for the entire population under consideration.

Sorry, not prove — that’s fairly well explained in methods courses, that we can’t “prove” anything. We can be 95%, 99% sure, 99.99% sure, and so forth. (By the way, 95% is the usual standard for us. Higher standards aren’t necessary since lives rarely hang in the balance in this line of work.) Despite the repeated statements about the standard scientific idea that we can only disprove hypotheses, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of doubt about causes.

The tricky thing about causes is that they generally have causes themselves. I don’t mean to get into any kind of metaphysical “first cause” argument here, because that’s not the issue. The problem is that the social world is very complicated, and causes impact upon other causes in a terribly convoluted string of events which can be traced back potentially forever.

I don’t think this comes across very well in sociology courses, or else it is not something that many people are interested in talking about. And so, we seem to push the problem of regress out of our heads, forgetting our own mantras of unprovability. Is the problem solved by practicalities such as running out of resources to trace lines back? Perhaps, but this doesn’t seem to be a very satisfying answer.

Isms

Are empiricism and positivism “isms” in the sense that “feminism”, “Marxism”, and so forth are? I would wager that many social scientists do not think so. Indeed, science itself is usually held to be not just different, but superior — in a league of its own — compared to other theories or ways of thinking.

In the opening lecture of a sociology class today, the professor made it known that he was “not politically correct”, a self-label that usually throws up warning signs for me. He proceeded to describe his distrust of “isms”, while admonishing us to be empirical and to “let the data speak for itself.” I was struck by the way that he seemed to believe that feminists and Marxists were “warping” the data, or discarding it when it did not fit with their world view. This may be true in some cases, but positivistic science is a theory base like any other, and personal subjective views still come into it.

To sum: I don’t believe that data will usually “speak for itself.” Neither do I believe in so-called “torturing the data” in order to make it confess what we want to hear. The problem is that sociology can fall into the trap of assuming that the truth is out there, somewhere — if only we can find it. This seems to me a dangerous position, especially given our dismal success at incremental, additive theory.

The rest of the introduction was mostly weak intimidation about how difficult the course would be and how graduate school would be hard, and so forth. Well, in that, he might have been right. If graduate school is made up of aggressively single-minded sociology professors unwilling to consider their own biases, then yes, perhaps I will indeed not do very well there.