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Girl Scouts Add ‘Game Developer’ Badge, Video Games Still Sexist

April 18, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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The Girl Scouts of Greater Los Angeles and Women in Games International are teaming up to create a new badge for girl scouts: video game development. From Girl Gamer: “Our ultimate goal is to create a STEM-aligned video game badge for the Girl Scouts of the United States of America,” said Amy Allison, vice president at WIGI. “Creating this badge will get young girls excited in technology and science and let them know that they, too, can have a career in the video game industry.” "STEM" stands for "science, technology, engineering, and mathematics," an area in which the Girl Scouts ... Read More

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Terrorism and Privilege: Tim Wise on the Power of Whiteness

April 18, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Editor's Note: This post originally appeared on Sociological Images, a Pacific Standard partner site. As the nation weeps for the victims of the horrific bombing in Boston, one searches for lessons amid the carnage, and finds few. That violence is unacceptable stands out as one, sure. That hatred—for humanity, for life, or whatever else might have animated the bomber or bombers—is never the source of constructive human action seems like a reasonably close second. But I dare say there is more; a much less obvious and far more uncomfortable lesson, which many are loathe to learn, but ... Read More

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It Gets Better, Y’all

April 8, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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A man in a cowboy hat stands in a field, next to a tractor, guitar in hand. The hat is white and the man is white and the tractor is red. This is the music video for one of the most popular songs in America right now, a song that name-checks Billy Graham, sweet tea, NASCAR, and biscuits with gravy. For good measure, the hit single also quotes generously from "Dixie," the unofficial Confederate anthem once performed by blackface minstrels, in which a freed slave sings longingly about the plantation of his birth. For pop-country listeners, this song has been on heavy rotation during a ... Read More

More like this: Culture, May-June 2013
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We Aren’t the World

February 25, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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IN THE SUMMER of 1995, a young graduate student in anthropology at UCLA named Joe Henrich traveled to Peru to carry out some fieldwork among the Machiguenga, an indigenous people who live north of Machu Picchu in the Amazon basin. The Machiguenga had traditionally been horticulturalists who lived in single-family, thatch-roofed houses in small hamlets composed of clusters of extended families. For sustenance, they relied on local game and produce from small-scale farming. They shared with their kin but rarely traded with outside groups. While the setting was fairly typical for an ... Read More

More like this: Cover Story, March-April 2013
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Do the Arts Open Hearts?

November 5, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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Would you like to meet people who are engaged in their communities, tolerant of others’ differences, and more willing than most to help out those in need? Try a concert hall, theater lobby, or art museum. People who regularly attend arts events are more likely to embody the aforementioned qualities, even after taking into account such variables as age, race and education. That’s the key finding of a new study by political scientist Kelly LeRoux of the University of Illinois at Chicago. It’s the first in a series of studies on the arts and society funded by research grants from ... Read More

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Dip in Arts Attendance Tied to Decline of the Omnivore

March 14, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

The omnivore may not technically qualify as an endangered species. But the coveted creature — known for its sensitivity, inquisitiveness and tendency to congregate around galleries and concert halls — is in decline. And that poses a major challenge to America’s arts organizations. Omnivores — defined by sociologists as people who regularly participate in a broad range of cultural activities — represent a small minority of the population, but a large portion of the arts audience. In a new analysis recently released by the National Endowment for the Arts, author Mark J. Stern ... Read More

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Different Cultures, Different Robots

October 13, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

Cultures have their own songs, holidays, special foods ... and robots. Selma Sabanovic, an associate professor of informatics at Indiana University, described why last week during a talk on "Emotion in Robot Cultures" at the 7th International Conference on Design and Emotion in Chicago. People building social robots in the West and in Japan are interested in ending up with two very different types of machines, she explained. Western robots are engineered to more explicitly express emotion, while those from Japan are generally as expressive as the masks worn by actors in traditional ... Read More

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The Veil Becomes a Fashion Statement

February 11, 2010 • By • 1 Comment

A few weeks ago, Iraqi journalist Dalya Hassan created a stir with an essay in The Washington Post explaining why she had decided to don a veil. Before her marriage, Hassan went about her home country uncovered. She describes her prenuptial wardrobe as "short skirts and shirts with short sleeves," perfect for the sweltering heat of Baghdad summers. But when her new husband told her she needed to wear a hijab, she reluctantly agreed. Though hot and uncomfortable, Hassan admits that, "after 2003, wearing the hijab became a means of protection." And, she points out, "male relatives forc[ing] ... Read More

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Things Fall Together: An Introduction

March 10, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

Our cultural lives — the books we read and how we read them, the films we see and how they are made, the sports we watch and the athletes who take our money, the music we listen to and sometimes illegally download — are in a state of flux. Yeats' oft-quoted lines — "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold" — have been made relevant again by the recession, the rapid changes in information technology or simply in our new reading habits. Books and films, among other cultural objects, both diagnose and reflect these changes. Consider some examples. The Museum of Modern Art hired ... Read More

More like this: Research of Culture
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