University of Texas at Austin Sociology Department

University of Texas at Austin Sociology Department Day One Theory Area Comprehensive (Comps) Exams 2011-2012

Monday October 17th 2011, 9am–1pm

You have four hours within which to answer two questions from the list of seven below. Where you are not asked to address the work of a specific theorist, make sure that in your answer you draw substantively on the work of at least one author from the classical theory list and at least one author from the contemporary list. Write out the full question as written below and the number at the start of each answer.

Classical list Simone de Beauvoir W.E.B. Du Bois Emile Durkheim Norbert Elias Frantz Fanon Sigmund Freud Erving Goffman Herbert Blumer Karl Marx C. Wright Mills Georg Simmel Talcott Parsons Max Weber

Contemporary list Zygmunt Bauman Ulrich Beck Pierre Bourdieu Judith Butler Nancy Chodorow James Coleman Patricia Hill Collins Randall Collins Michel Foucault Anthony Giddens Paul Gilroy Jurgen Habermas Michael Mann Chandra Talpade Mohanty Charles Tilly

1 1. The State Choose three theorists and discuss their contributions to sociological understandings of state practices and their differential consequences for different bodies. You should discuss the tensions that exist in the multiple understanding of “state practices” and “the body”.

2. Inequality Choose two theorists from Group One and two theorists from Group Two to answer the following question: What contributions have your chosen theorists made to sociological understandings of inequality? Group One: W.E.B. DuBois, Frantz Fanon, Karl Marx, Max Weber Group Two: Judith Butler, Patricia Hill Collins, Michel Foucault, Charles Tilly

3. Violence Critically analyze the ways in which theorists have understood and conceptualized the productive role of violence within revolutionary politics and radical social movements.

4. Ontology and method Many sociologists have argued that the practice of sociology is inherently and inescapably reflexive. Explain what is meant by the notion of a “reflexive sociology” and the extent to which such an approach is compatible with a model of sociological work driven by the goal of objective social science research that is supported by a positivistic methodological framework.

5. Modernities Pick three theorists that vary greatly in their understanding and evaluation of modernity. Discuss (by comparing and contrasting) their understandings of modernity. What are the discontents and/or the emancipatory promises of modernity according to them? What is the crux of their diverging accounts?

6. Culture and Economy Critically analyze the utility of the “base-superstructure” metaphor as a conceptual tool for thinking about the relationship between economic forces and cultural practices within contemporary western nations.

7. The Body Are historical changes in the discipline, discourse, and surveillance of the body good markers of the emergence of and changes in modernities. If so, what would those markers look like?