UNLV Sociology Faculty Publications: Simon Gottschalk

Guided by Augé’s concept of “non-place,” we conduct a mobile ethnography of the Las Vegas Strip to evoke and critically reflect on the characteristics of such environments. Informed by our findings, we contribute to the scholarship of non-places by (1) attending to three components of such environments that are seldom mentioned together (temporal organization, soundscape, and social control) and (2) suggesting a tentative model of non-places that integrates function (entertainment, transportation, hospitality, consumption); design (signage, movement, temporal organization, and soundscape); social control system (their mechanisms, visibility, power, sanctions, types of violation); performances (the roles they prompt users to play and the interactions they direct them to perform), and subjectivities (the sort of self-experiences they induce). In the conclusions, we summarize our findings and revisit the concept of non-place.

What do interactions in virtual spaces suggest about everyday life in the digital age? How do interactions in virtual spaces shape everyday life in the digital age? Guided by hypermodern theory, I conduct participant observation in the social virtual world Second Life to provide tentative answers to those questions. I suggest that Second Life is both a social psychological playground where participants enjoy individualistic fantasies and a virtual community where they collaborate on collective projects. When people define the virtual as real, it is real in its consequences. Accordingly, social virtual spaces such as Second Life offer sociologists unique opportunities for research, education, intervention, and hence the development of a virtual imagination.

Recent French sociological scholarship suggests the notion of hypermodernity to characterize the contemporary moment. While the meanings of this concept vary, the idea of excess seems central. Informed by this new scholarship, this article analyzes the superlative rhetoric in contemporary televised and internet commercials, and suggests elective affinities between this rhetoric and the various trends characterizing the hypermodern present.

Relying on the analysis of ethnographic and documentary data, this article explains how U.S. White Power Movement (WPM) activists use music to produce collective occasions and experiences that we conceptualize as the movement's music scene. We use the concept “music scene” to refer to the full range of movement occasions in which music is the organizing principle. Members experience these not as discrete events, but as interconnected sets of situations that form a relatively coherent movement music scene. We emphasize three analytically distinct dimensions of this scene—local, translocal, and virtual—and specify how each contributes to emotionally loaded experiences that nurture collective identity. Participants claim that strong feelings of dignity, pride, pleasure, love, kinship, and fellowship are supported through involvement in the WPM music scene. These emotions play a central role in vitalizing and sustaining member commitments to movement ideals.

Grounded on the analysis of MMPI tests administered to 90 jailed Middle Eastern terrorists, and semi-structured interviews with 57 Middle Eastern terrorists released from jail, this paper suggests that, regardless of their ethnicity, religiosity, political affiliations, or gender, Middle Eastern terrorists share common social-psychological tendencies. Organizing these tendencies under the labels of “authoritarianism” and “pathological hatred,” we suggest that contemporary terrorists are significantly different from their respective ethnic control groups and their predecessors. Briefly stated, rather than using violence against innocent civilians as a means to accomplish rational political ends, we suggest that today’s terrorists use rational political goals as a convenient means to inflict violence against innocent civilians.

Although most studies of the Second Generation typically account for their social psychological orientations by relying on psychiatric and psychological models, I propose an alternative “listening” to this cohort. I analyze in-depth interviews by adopting Hochschild's insights on emotion work as a sensitizing framework and suggest that (1) four interrelated types of “deep acting” they continuously feel compelled to perform can account for the psychological “symptoms” commonly attributed to them and (2) these types of deep acting constitute adjustments and reactions to problematic emotional dynamics characterizing their survivor families. I conclude with a discussion of the reciprocal effects of this emotion work.

We argue that the individual in society, his or her subjectivity, sense of selfhood, and
experience of a life world, all have an ecological dimension. We all experience our selves as being in a relationship with an ecology, and we all express our selves in a conversation with this web of connections. We orient ourselves to non-human others as well as human others and reference groups. We are all essentially grounded in, and bonded to, a nonhuman ...

While various theorists explain the postmodern moment or culture by pointing at an acceleration of transformations in macro-social institutions, such explanations remain often abstract and removed from everyday experience. Seeking to concretize how speed is articulated in popular texts, I analyze here the various strategies TV commercial ads deploy to inscribe speed as a normal and desirable quality of everyday life, objects, and self. Focusing on both pictorial and textual dimensions, I call the reader's attention to these strategies, and discuss the possible social and psychological consequences of the ideological orientations they articulate.