Positive Sociology

This morning, I found an extraordinary video of a gunfight happening just outside of an elementary school in Mexico.  The video isn't extraordinary because of the violence (although extreme violence is never easy to watch or hear about); it's extraordinary because of how the teacher responds to the violence.  Despite the sound of automatic gunfire erupting just outside the classroom, the teacher maintains her cool and even leads the students in a playful call-and-response song.  She is able to improvise in the middle of crisis.  After watching this video, I began to wonder: How much of improvisation is spontaneous?  How much of it is learned?  A couple years ago, I published an article called  "Escaping Embarrassment: Face-Work in the Rap Cipher" in Social Psychology Quarterly .  This particular paper is drawn from ethnographic fieldwork of street corner rap ciphers (sessions) in South Central LA.  In the paper, I argue that improvisation ("freestyling"

For the past 1.5 years I've been studying people who are victims of gun violence.  After meeting them at the University of Pennsylvania's outpatient trauma clinic, I follow them around to learn about the many challenges that people face while trying to rebuild their lives. Time and time again, I've come across individuals whose lives are disrupted in ways that exceed what most folks can even imagine.  In addition to the psychological scars that remain long after a person leaves hospital care, people often live with chronic injuries that make even the most routine activities (e.g. sleeping, brushing teeth, laughing) tricky and often quite painful. For instance, "David" is a 25-year old African American man who was in the peak of his physical life when he was nearly gunned down.  One evening while walking home from a friend's house, he passed by a large group gathering inside of a high school's parking lot.  As he ventured closer to see what was happenin

I woke up this morning and found out that Jared Loughner--the man who killed 6 people and wounded 13 others during a mass shooting in Tucson, AZ--has been deemed by psychiatrists and psychologists to be "unfit" to stand trial.  A BBC report claims that Loughner had outbursts during preliminary hearings and is now undergoing additional evaluations to see if he will ever be able to stand trial.  All of this made me reflect on the case of Aileen Wuornos, dubbed by the media as "America's first female serial killer."   In David Broomfield's documentary, "Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer," we learn that Aileen underwent the same kinds of psych evaluations and was deemed competent enough to stand trial, and ultimately to be put to death.  In fact, Broomfield tells us that Aileen underwent a very brief, 15-minute psych evaluation the day before she was executed.  This happened around the same time when she was developing elaborate conspiracy t