LIT6856: Modernity, Rationality, and Irrationality, Fall 2018 Course Meetings: Fridays, periods 3-5 (9:35 AM-12:35 PM); in TUR 4112 Instructor: Professor Susan Hegeman / shegeman@ufl.edu/ 352-294-2815 / TUR 4119 Office hours: Tuesdays, 11:35-1:35, or by appointment Course Description A nearly axiomatic definition of modernity, usually associated with Max Weber, emphasizes the increasing rationality – and rationalization …

Continue reading Syllabus for 6856: Modernity, Rationality, and Irrationality

(first published February 19, 2018) Last Wednesday, the day that seventeen young people were murdered in their school in Parkland, Florida, one of my own children’s teachers interrupted the regular curriculum to talk to them about what to do if an “active shooter” showed up at their school. Here’s what he told them: If the shooter is in the …

Continue reading Normalized Gun Violence…or a New Student Movement?

I added a University of Florida building to the Living New Deal map of buildings and monuments created under the New Deal. "Albert A. Murphree Hall was undertaken during the Great Depression with the assistance of the Federal Administration of Public Works. The building is a residence hall on the northern side of the University …

Continue reading My First Living New Deal entry goes live!

I just submitted my first entry for the collaborative Living New Deal Map Project. This very cool public history project maps New Deal agency works of art, public works projects, Civilian Conservation Corps. projects etc. all over the US. There are quite a few missing entries for Florida, including my first submission, Murphree Hall, on …

Continue reading The Living New Deal Map Project

In the context of the apparent closure of neoliberalism, I can think of no more profoundly humanist statement than “no mode of production and therefore no dominant social order and therefore no dominant culture ever in reality includes or exhausts all human practice, human energy, and human intention” (Williams 1978: 125). Raymond Williams’s comment, which …

Continue reading A Sociological Imagination

This post is about the artwork I'm using in the header of this blog.  Currently, I'm working on a project on MACOS, or Man a Course of Study.  MACOS was an innovative and lavishly-funded social studies curriculum that was created in the late 1960s and early 1970s US that emphasized anthropology and behavioral psychology.  For …

Continue reading Leo and Diane Dillon