- Between weeks 8 and 12, each student should provide a weekly reflection (500 words) on the data you have collected to date.
- What data did you collect?
- What is your initial impression of the data?
- How have the data you have collected this week changed/progressed your thinking about your research project?
- What challenges did you encounter while collecting the data?
- What are your next steps?
Post class presentation thoughts:
I need a frame, and the issue of the contradiction between using corporation choice as an argument against government (especially federal) legislation mandating trans rights and protesting against it when individual companies choose to expand their own policies to further trans rights. Thus far, my research has shown that conservative family values-oriented political groups vary in the extent to which they align themselves politically and philosophically, but they all place their standards of morality above the specific choices of individual corporations.
I think that this is a good focus, and will help guide the remaining research that I will do, and shape what I look for from my primary sources. I could bring in a bit of social movement theory, and use some of the readings from last semester, like bringing in Meyer and Staggenborg’s work, “Movements, Countermovements, and the Structure of Political Opportunity” and relate that theory, seeing to what degree their frame works with this set of movements and counter-movements. Perhaps also Verta Taylor, Katrina Kimport, Nella VanDyke, and Ellen Andersen’s article “Culture and Mobilization: Tactical Repertoires, Same-Sex Weddings, and the Impact on Gay Activism”. I could potentially also bring in Strangers in their Own Land, to discuss the idea of morality coming before the market, even as the market is held up on a pedestal.
I think it will also be useful to look at the current Supreme Court gender case, but perhaps only for part of the conclusion, since a Supreme Court case has a lot to discuss on its own and that could pull me off track. In the future I will get more details on that, as well as finding a sociological article about current trans conceptions of gender. I have been looking for that less because I feel that I already have a grasp on it, but to be properly academic I should find a source that I can quote and discuss.
David S. Meyer and Susan Staggenborg, “Movements, Countermovements, and the Structure of Political Opportunity,” American Journal of Sociology 101, 6 (1996): 1628-1660.
This article uses the example of pro-choice and antiabortion activists to explain their frame of movement-countermovement theory. While the abortion debate is not exactly my topic, it is a similar enough social issue, along pretty much the same social cleavages, that I should be able to neatly compare their argument to my own.
Verta Taylor, Katrina Kimport, Nella VanDyke, and Ellen Andersen, “Culture and Mobilization: Tactical Repertoires, Same-Sex Weddings, and the Impact on Gay Activism,” American Sociological Review 74 (2009): 865-890.
I think that this article will provide goos theoretical ties to the ideas of the role of individual businesses in political and social conflict around social issues. In particular, it will give analysis that I can discuss on conservative reactions to individual corporation choice.