| Vol.
7 No. 4
February/March 2005
Anatomy
of a Lullaby
In Emory's growing sleep
research program, scholars encounter mystery and paradox
Stealing
breath and life
Sleep
Apnea
We
do have some very good people [in sleep research], and we’re
gaining a critical mass to do this kind of work.
Donald
L. Bliwise, Professor of Neurology, Program Director, Sleep, Aging
and Chronobiology
I
think there are valuable things we can learn about how plastic or
mutable the circadian system is by looking at people who travel
abroad and contend with jet lag, or people from different cultures.
Hillary Rodman, Associate Professor of
Psychology
The
Power of Sleep
Exploring disorder and disturbance
Kathy
P. Parker, Edith F. Honeycutt Professor of Nursing
What’s
A Few Drinks Between Friends?
Exploring
the ancient drinking party with students
Peter
Bing, Associate Professor of Classics
Transforming
and Transformative Knowledge
Practicing what we profess
Karen
D. Scheib, Associate Professor of Pastoral Care and Pastoral Theology
Further
reading
Endnotes
Return
to Contents
|
Dismissing
the South
Some academics, often in my own university, have a really hard time
coming to terms with my insistence on studying the South. Well-meaning
but incredulous colleagues have often wondered why I bother with
the South at all. Their comments suggest that an interest in the
South is terribly old-fashioned, if not conservative. But such a
mindset replays the South’s role in the nation in an academic
setting, cordoning the South off as hopelessly out-of-date and backwards,
as an embarrassing site of retrograde regionalism. This attitude
precisely misses what we can learn from the South—about both
the region and the nation, if not the circuits of global capitalism.
After all, Wal-Mart, the world’s largest corporation, hails
from Arkansas, exporting a new style of plantation economy for the
next millennium.
—Tara McPherson, Associate Professor of Critical Studies
and Gender Studies, the University of Southern California, from
“Re-imagining the Red States: New Directions for Southern
Studies,” sponsored by the Program in American Studies and
the departments of sociology, women’s studies, film studies,
and English, on November 15, 2004
The libido pugilistica
The guys who come into the [boxing] gym already have their own social
libido. They have an unformed and an undirected drive to achieve,
to affirm themselves. They are looking in a sense for a stage, to
fabricate themselves. The gym and the ring give them a particular
theater in which they can, in a sense, collectively produce themselves
as a new being out of the old. They come to the gate of the gym,
and typically they have a street libido, a desire to affirm their
masculine prowess. They come from a lower-class milieu in which
physical courage and hardness towards pain is highly valorized.
But you can have physical courage and an instrumental relationship
to your body as a possible resource, and become a whole variety
of things. You can become a gang member. You can become a factory
worker. And you can become a boxer. One of the things that attracts
people to the gym is that they find a protective shield against
the streets. It is not what the gym will do to them; it is what
the gym takes them away from. For a lot of guys who come into the
gym, the origin of libido pugilistica is a negative determination,
a desire to escape other fates.
—Loic Wacquant, Distinguished University Professor of
Sociology and Anthropology at the New School for Social Research,
Professor of Sociology at the University of California-Berkeley,
and a Researcher at the Center for European Sociology in Paris,
from “Body and Soul: On Becoming an Apprentice Boxer,”
sponsored by the Center for the Study of Public Scholarship, December
3, 2004 |