Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology
I haven’t had many encounters with the police over the years. Most of those encounters involve getting fined for petty driving violations. This probably lines up with the experience of most readers.
But my most recent encounter – from a year or two ago – highlights a few things for me. It shows, I think, the dangers inherent in any contact with police officers on duty. Even when nothing outrageously bad results from it.
So, we’re in the middle of the summer heat. Time to read something to cool down?
Well, maybe. Maybe not. It’s true that I’ve been reading more fiction lately. But I’m reading a wide range of things these days.
Continue on for this month’s list. Along with fiction, I’ve been reading some stuff on activism and practical writing tips…
Sociologists Michael McCarthy and Mathieu Hikaru Desan recently sketched out their response to the class reductionism debate. Their approach lines up rather nicely with the one I took in a post and article. But they also make conceptual space for views I think we can see floating around in various forms. I want to take a look at one such view: class constructivism.
I’ll start by saying a word about how McCarthy and Desan lay out the conceptual space. And then I’ll move on to sketch out class constructivism. While few views completely fit into the class constructivism camp, I think we can find appeals to something like it within common perspectives in both DSA and the broader left.
I hit the academic philosophy job market in 2011 and stayed there – in some form or another – until 2015. Things really sucked back then. It was hard for anyone to get a job, but women and other under-represented groups faced special difficulties, both on the job market and in the years before hitting the market.
We talked about these things all the time in those days. But I mostly dropped out of those discussions after 2015. It’s not that I lost interest in the topic, exactly. I still think it’s an important topic. Rather, it’s that I’m no longer a part of the philosophy profession. Sure, I’ll always have a PhD in Philosophy, a publishing record, and an interest in the topics and issues. So I’ll always think of myself as a philosopher. But I landed a non-academic job in 2013. I published my most recent article in a philosophy journal in 2016. And I now sport a decade long career outside of academia.
But I recently found an occasion to peer back in. I’ll do so by looking at data showing a very different job market situation. Data now show that women do better than men on the philosophy job market.
What’s going on there?
I don’t have many lofty thoughts on the topic of working while sick. It’s just that I recently overheard someone coughing in public, and it made me uncomfortable. Not as uncomfortable as it would have in March or April 2020. But uncomfortable.
Uncomfortable in a way that it wouldn’t have made me in 2019, you know? And that takes me back to the world of the white-collar office before 2020. When people showed up to work, in-person, while sick. And they did it all the damn time.
What was with that?
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