U of C Sociology
Pete and I have marveled at times about how eerily similar we are in some ways, and how incredibly different we are in others. It started of course in college when we were the only two people who knew or cared about geography. After college, when I went away for a year and came back, we discovered we both had gotten a manual SLR and were shooting black and white photos. And of course now there's our recent conversion into the cult of statistics. Pete uses it to figure out who's most likely to give money, I use it to try to figure out who's going to get a disease or die.
The one thing that's always separated us has been sociology. Pete was fully indoctrinated into the Chicago School of Sociology and although I enjoyed my Urban Structure class, it always felt very inexact and...squishy. But recently, I realized (to my horror) that I may be coming around.
First, I was taking a class on qualitative methods and we spent a full class on the sociologic underpinnings of Qualitative Research. There were all these names which I had forgotten (Talcott Parsons, Erving Goffman) that were yanked back into my memory. Maybe that's why I dropped the class.
Next, I was doing some background work on the relationship between race and mortality, and realized that the seminal work in the US was done by another Chicago Sociologist, Evelyn Kitagawa. I remember her name from when I was really interested in Chicago neighborhoods and she's the one who painstakingly travelled all over Chicago and mapped the 57 (?) neighborhoods. I didn't know she did anything else, but apparently she also published this book which showed that being poor and uneducated was really bad for you.
The one thing that's always separated us has been sociology. Pete was fully indoctrinated into the Chicago School of Sociology and although I enjoyed my Urban Structure class, it always felt very inexact and...squishy. But recently, I realized (to my horror) that I may be coming around.
First, I was taking a class on qualitative methods and we spent a full class on the sociologic underpinnings of Qualitative Research. There were all these names which I had forgotten (Talcott Parsons, Erving Goffman) that were yanked back into my memory. Maybe that's why I dropped the class.
Next, I was doing some background work on the relationship between race and mortality, and realized that the seminal work in the US was done by another Chicago Sociologist, Evelyn Kitagawa. I remember her name from when I was really interested in Chicago neighborhoods and she's the one who painstakingly travelled all over Chicago and mapped the 57 (?) neighborhoods. I didn't know she did anything else, but apparently she also published this book which showed that being poor and uneducated was really bad for you.
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