While any brief description of The Florida Project (2017) may paint the setting and characters as delinquents engaged in a destructive lifestyle, what makes this film beautiful are the extraordinary acts of kindness, love, and mutual support. For example, arguments between characters often later give way to sharing cigarettes and other small acts of compassion. This demonstration of empathy is evident in director Sean Baker’s other films as well, most notably Tangerine (2015).
Cooked: Survival by Zipcode (2019) tells the story of the tragic 1995 Chicago heatwave, the most traumatic in U.S. history, in which 739 citizens died over the course of just a single week, most of them poor, elderly, and African American. This is a story about life, death, and the politics of crisis in an American city that asks the questions: What if we approached poverty through the lens of disaster management?
CBS Sunday Morning, 2023, 6:10… Teton County in Wyoming is home to the widest income divide in America, with a median house price of more than $5 million and an average income of $318,000. Correspondent Ben Tracy looks at how the wealthy, drawn to the state's picture-perfect settings, have been squeezing out the middle class – the very people needed to keep the community running.
Vox, 2021, 20:01… Education in the United States is supposed to be meritocratic, meaning a student’s achievement is measured solely by their efforts. But how do class and privilege affect opportunity, and does everyone really get the same shot? Glad You Asked host Fabiola Cineas explores how the myth of meritocracy perpetuates racism while keeping the American dream achievable only for a privileged few.
Hillbilly (2018) examines the history and continuation of disempowering rural stereotypes. Though the film is based around the 2016 election of Donald Trump, the content extends far beyond our current political landscape. It is also engaging to watch as it masterfully integrates media stereotypes from popular shows and movies. Some prominent sociological concepts evident in the film include othering, codeswitching, and cultural appropriation as hillbilly may have become the new hipster..
WIRED, 2022, 7:36… This video helps dispel the myth of billionaire job creators. The share of income going to the top 1% of households has doubled since the 1980s while their collective investment in our society has been in decline. They are not using such gains to create jobs, raise wages, or uplift the lower classes more generally. Our taxation policies also allow billionaires to pay minimal taxes. While they may give to charities, their donations do not offset the damages they create by hoarding wealth. All of this is unfortunate for society and the economy as this increasing wealth inequality is associated with lower productivity.
Vox, 2021, 6:48… It’s time to stop looking at trees as a form of “beautification.” They are, instead, a living form of infrastructure, providing a variety of services that include stormwater management, air filtering, carbon sequestration, and, most importantly for a city like Phoenix, Arizona, they cool the environment around them.
CBS Sunday Morning, 2021, 3:39… Martin Riese is America's first certified water sommelier, who studies the subtle flavors of bottled water, and prepares menus pairing specific brands with foods. Correspondent Jonathan Vigliotti sits down with Riese to discuss his unique palate, and his thirst for spreading the word on water.
Vox, 2021, 9:41… Zoning laws are the local rules and regulations that decide what types of homes can be built where. These rules can sometimes have good intentions. But they also have a dark history in the United States as a tool to keep certain races, religions, and nationalities out of white neighborhoods. And while zoning laws in the US are no longer explicitly racist, their effect remains basically the same: to keep affordable housing, and the people who need it, away from the wealthiest Americans.
Vox, 2020, 6:33… In most developed countries, workers have the right to a certain number of paid sick days. It’s a policy that isn’t rooted in just generosity — during pandemics like the novel coronavirus, it can literally save lives. When workers have to choose between earning a living and staying home sick, it incentivizes them to come to work when they're ill, and potentially infect their colleagues and anyone else they come into contact with. That’s why public health officials are concerned that millions of American workers don’t have access to paid sick days. And a disproportionate share of those workers are concentrated in occupations like food service and hospitality, where there’s potential to infect the hundreds of customers many of them interact with every day.
AJ+, 2019, 12:00… Dolly Parton is an American icon. But she stands, perhaps most importantly, as a timeless ode to the foundation of this country: the working class. In the inaugural episode of Pop Americana, Sana Saeed explores the radical politics of Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” - the song, the film and the album. We threw in some Marxist theory too.
Adam Ruins Everything, 2019, 4:44… Americans subscribe to the individualistic fantasy that hard work results in success, and the “American Dream” can loosely be interpreted as climbing the social ladder. Sociologists call that (upward) social mobility, a concept describing how individuals can change their socioeconomic status. While mobility is possible in open class systems, increasing structural inequalities are making this ever more difficult in the United States.
Vox, 2019, 6:35… Child labor was widely practiced until a photographer showed the public what it looked like. The 1900 US Federal Census revealed that 1.75 million children under the age of 16, more than one in five, were gainfully employed. They worked all over the country in cotton mills, glass blowing factories, sardine canneries, farms, and even coal mines. In an effort to expose this exploitation of children, the National Child Labor Committee hired a photographer to travel around the country and investigate and report on the labor conditions of children.
Vice News, 2019, 7:02… Mzu Lembeni runs one of the many tour companies that takes tourists into Cape Town’s townships, impoverished areas that were first created when the Apartheid government forced nonwhites to live in segregated areas. On his tour, tourists can walk right into people’s homes, drink homemade liquor, play with children at a local school, and take as many pictures as they like. For some people, this sounds like exploitation. But Lembeni, who grew up in a township himself, disagrees. “If there was no poverty ... I'll do the township tour, because [of] the culture,” Lembeni says. “I don't sell the poverty, I sell the culture.”
