Joseph E. Davis is Research Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia and moderator of the Picturing the Human colloquy at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. His latest book is Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery.
The growing damage to truthfulness reflects something more—not just a personal discrepancy but a deep social discrepancy as well.
More disorder, more screening, more care: the familiar talking points, all dutifully repeated.
How is an alignment of the authentic self and the college admissions process possible?
Nowhere has the power of disembodied observation become more pervasive than in the workplace.
The normative appeal of the new gerontology to individual autonomy and responsibility makes it even clearer that “failure” is precisely what is at stake.
The overselling of possible cures and even the eradication of diseases has yielded vast outlays for genetic and stem cell research.
Mysteriously, biologically, men and women want, or want to want, “the same thing.”
Demands on our attention come from the informational environments and shared physical spaces we inhabit. At issue are ethical questions about the conduct of civic life.
How the American Dream—hope in the future—competes in these times with a pervasive pessimism.
What constitutes the public good of a liberal education?
MLK’s American Dream always appealed to the value of equality.
The successful marketing of the “new science of morality” suggests its considerable allure for the popular imagination.
Work is not just an economic matter. Beyond survival, a range of other human values and ideals are at stake.
While structures of power may change quickly, the building of a new social order is a longer and more precarious process.
The rate of change, the kinds of change, and the scope of change taking place today are impossible to understand without also looking at the ways they are affecting societies and how we understand and experience ourselves and others.
We know very little about what we are doing, why we do it, or how we feel about it.
Social and cultural change, from the rise of the “information economy” to changes in family life to the technological mediation of our relationships, is happening all around us.
Thinking more deeply about how we can inhabit the public sphere with others.
While most people have felt the effects of the recession, there are acute disparities between people.
The highly abstract and immaterial phantom economy is inextricable from the “real economy.”
Adolescents can and often do live under considerable stress.
The shaping and conditioning of our self-understanding by consumption is one form of the commodification of self.
Despite predictions to the contrary, questions of subjectivity and multiple identities have reemerged with a new force and a new urgency.
A review of the literature on identity and social change.
“We live an increasingly fragmented, multi-roled existence.”
Our exploitive relationship to the natural order is greatly magnifying the possibility of spillover and increasing virus virulence.
Summer reads from THR staff and friends.