å Saturday, November 14th, 2015

Hi everyone,

I’ve said this in class, but I want to thank all of you again for bringing so much energy and insight to the themes and issues addressed in this course. You are all so thoughtful and have made this class really fabulous.

For your interest, I want to tell you about another course I’m teaching this spring. This is in addition to the Urban Sociology course we discussed in class. This is a hybrid course on the family (I think it’s listed as Sociology of the Family.)

I’m not quite done with the syllabus yet, but there will be some interesting connections to the work we’ve done this semester. We are going to explore Arlie Hochschild’s work on emotional labor, a concept not unrelated to the “free labor” connected to digital economies online.

In addition, and I think this might be particularly interesting to some of you, we will explore how the shape of the family (in the U.S. and around the world) is influenced by war. There is a lot of really smart work that has been done about how the Korean War impacted family life, both there and here. We will discuss how traumatic events like war can have structural impacts on the family. Alongside these impacts we will ask after the psychological implications of war on family life, considering how war can lead to an unresolved trauma unconsciously passed from one generation to the next through the family.

Thanks again everyone and see you Thursday!

Elizabeth