Thursday, April 24, 2014

The Wall

Is available on Netflix...


You should watch it.  That is, if you're in the mood for a thoughtful, patient, gentle, and sad examination of the nature of solitude.  

An Austrian-German co-production released in 2012 as Die Wand. It's based on a 1963 novel of the same name by Marlen Haushofer.  I missed it altogether in 2012 - didn't even hear of it until now - but it was well-received by film critics.  For all but a few seconds it features only the quietly talented German actress Martina Gedeck.  I did not recognize her, but now recall her performance in the excellent 2006 film, The Lives of Others.  

The nominally science-fiction or fantasy premise - a woman finds herself alone, trapped behind a transparent barrier that encloses an alpine hunting lodge and surrounding meadows, forests, and mountain vistas - is essentially an unresolved prop that sets the what-if elements of the story rolling.  

The pace of this somber and thoughtful film is not for everyone.  The story is at once calming and disturbing, asking the viewer, "What if you had no choice but to live alone at Walden Pond - without human contact - indefinitely?"

Social Construction of Moral Panics

Been bashing this topic around with the professor's next door...


There may be a capstone in this topic if we find the right contrarian.

MORAL PANICS: Culture, Politics, and Social Construction 
The Political Construction of Collective Insecurity: From Moral Panic to Blame Avoidance and Organized Irresponsibility 

These are the only one I've read so far.  No telling when I’ll get to the rest.  I still have several gigs of unread papers collected while researching my Master's...

A Field Guide to Social Construction

Beck's Sociology of Risk: A Critical Assessment 
http://www.sagepub.com/mcdonaldizationstudy5/articles/Weber%20and%20Other%20Supporting%20Theories_Articles%20PDFs/Elliott.pdf

Critical Theory of World Risk Society: A Cosmopolitan Vision 
http://www.ulrichbeck.net-build.net/uploads/constellations.pdf

Daring to Fear: Optimizing the Encounter of Danger through Education

Fear of crime: audit of the literature and community programs volume 1

Functional fear and public insecurities about crime 

Introduction: The Moral Panic Concept


Moral Panic and Social Theory: Beyond the Heuristic 

Moral panic versus the risk society: the implications of the changing sites of social anxiety

Place, social relations and the fear of crime: a review

The Biology of Fear

The Edge and the Center: Gated Communities and the Discourse of Urban Fear

The only thing we have to fear is the ‘culture of fear’ itself
http://www.frankfuredi.com/pdf/fearessay-20070404.pdf

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF XENOPHOBIA AND OTHER-ISMS
ftp://ftp.cordis.europa.eu/pub/improving/docs/ser_racism_burns.pdf

An FTP site?!! I didn't know they still had those. Quell retro!

These are just the result of some rudimentary Google-fu. Haven’t even gone into the academic DBs yet.

Our role in moral panics can be unconscious, accidental, or deliberate. The choice is ours.