I think I speak for all (or at least most) of my classmates when I say that Documentary Filmmaking has challenged me more than I imagined and has taught me more than I could have anticipated. For the week and a half, and particularly the last four days, we have gone into overdrive working on our …
Category Archives: Sociology
Week Two
Mock in-class interview So ends Week Two! This week in documentary filmmaking, we focused on the delicate art of interviewing subjects: something we all need to master (to some degree) for our final project. Including the practical elements of how to light your subject most effectively and how to record sound using a few …
Documentary Filmmaking
Hello! I am taking Documentary Filmmaking, a block centered around the creative and technical approaches to making documentaries, taught by alum Doug Pray (a documentary filmmaker himself). After a packed week, I’m excited to share some of the many tips, ideas, and artistic lessons I have already absorbed. My favorite assignment we did this week …
Disney is My Religion
Last night we read “The Happiest Place on Earth: Disney’s America and the Commodification of Religion,” (Mazur and Koda). It argues that for many Americans, salvation is a commodity. Disney is competing with religion by offering the same products: “mythologies, symbols, rituals, and notions of community by which consumers organize their lives.” Disney provides lessons …
My Sunday at Grace Baptist
One of our assignments is to attend a church (or other religious congregation) of our choice for the duration of the block. One of the churches that our professor said could be interesting was Grace Baptist Church, a fundamental church that interprets the King James’s Bible literally. This is the one I chose. I knew …
Civil Religion in America
Today in class we debated whether or not there is a civil religion in America. Again, we used Durkheim’s definition of a religion: a unifying set of practices. We discussed the rituals we participate in (like voting or saying the pledge of allegiance) that reinforce American’s shared value system rooted in democracy. We talked about …
Debutante Balls: A Religious Experience
Last Wednesday I handed in my senior thesis, “A Sociological Study of Debutantes.” Sociology of Religion started the following Monday and it was my first class since before Thanksgiving break. I was excited to finally be able to forget about my thesis. I should have known that it wouldn’t be that easy to forget. Our …
Life of Colin
There was one day in class when someone mentioned an episode of the TV show Portlandia (a parody of Portland, Oregon) where a couple in a restaurant is so concerned about where the chicken on the menu came from that they drive to a farm 30 miles south of the city to see exactly where the chicken, …
Ignorance, Knowledge, Dejection, Power, and Contextualization of Self in Outer Space. A Cycle.
We’ve just come to the end of third week, which means that we are approaching the dreaded FOURTH WEEK. This is when students survive on pizza, candy, and coffee. Lots of coffee. The end for my class in particular involves a systematic organizing of the concepts we’ve learned. Part of this is asking questions: Have …
DATA
I sometimes find quantitative, number- and statistic-based data to be like porcupines: prickly, pointed, and good to look at but not so good to touch. But for the past week, our class has been using a lot of data, and I like it. In groups of two or three we were assigned a city where …
