class: center, middle, inverse, title-slide # SOC 2208 Discussion Section ## Week 5 ### Xuewen Yan ### 2020-02-21 --- class: middle # Deep Stories Hochschild is fascinated by how people make sense of their lives, what shecalls the “deep story” that locates them in the world. A person’s deep story underlies their sense of what it means to lead a good life; what makes them proud or angry; where they feel at home. Hochschild conveys that she genuinely likes the people she meets,communicating their dignityand values. She doesn’t hide her bafflement at their politics, and she clearly felt comfortable enough with her subjects to argue back gently but persistently, probing for the bedrock of theirviews. (p16 Purdy) --- class: middle # Ethnography [...]I began my five-year journey to the heart of the American right carrying with me, as if it were a backpack, a great paradox. (p15 Hochschild) Over five years, I accumulated 4,690 pages of transcripts based on interviews with a core of forty Tea Party advocates and twenty others from various walks of life [...]. From within that core group, I selected a small number who illustrated particular patterns especially well. With their permission, I followed them around, asking to see where they were born, attended school and church, shopped, and had fun with them, and tried to get a feel for the influences on them. (p18 Hochschild) --- class: middle # Emotion in politics What, I wanted to know, do people *want to* feel, what do they think they *should* or *shouldn’t* feel, and what *do they feel* about a range of issues? [...] The right seeks release from liberal notions of what they should feel—happy for the gay newlywed, sad at the plight of the Syrian refugee, unresentful about paying taxes. The left sees prejudice. (p15, Hochschild) --- class: middle # Gaining access: the capacity to connect across difference A Lake Charles–based artist, Sally was a progressive Democrat who in the 2016 primary favored Bernie Sanders. Sally’s very dear friend and a world-traveling flight attendant from Opelousas, Louisiana, Shirley Slack was an enthusiast for the Tea Party and Donald Trump. Both women had joined sororities (although different ones) at Louisiana State University. Each had married, had three children, lived in homes walking distance apart in Lake Charles, and had keys to each other’s houses. Each loved the other’s children. Shirley knew Sally’s parents and even consulted Sally’s mother when the two got to “fussing too much. [...] While this book is not about the personal lives of these two women, it couldn’t have been written without them both, and I believe that their friendship models what our country itself needs to forge: the capacity to connect across difference. (p12-13 Hochschild) --- class: middle # Discussion questions - What role do power and/or knowledge elites play in Hochschild’s model of modern inequality? Be specific. - Is inequality justified in the eyes of Hochschild’s respondents? How could “line cutters” represent injustice and a rebuke to “natural” inequality? - How does the local welfare office act as the site of modern class conflict? - Anything else you want to say about the political divide in America and/or right-wing politics