Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Telling About Society
    Telling About Society
    Telling About Society
    Ebook443 pages8 hours

    Telling About Society

    By Howard S. Becker

    5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    I Remember, one of French writer Georges Perec’s most famous pieces, consists of 480 numbered paragraphs—each just a few short lines recalling a memory from his childhood. The work has neither a beginning nor an end. Nor does it contain any analysis. But it nonetheless reveals profound truths about French society during the 1940s and 50s.

    Taking Perec’s book as its cue, Telling About Society explores the unconventional ways we communicate what we know about society to others. The third in distinguished teacher Howard Becker’s best-selling series of writing guides for social scientists, the book explores the many ways knowledge about society can be shared and interpreted through different forms of telling—fiction, films, photographs, maps, even mathematical models—many of which remain outside the boundaries of conventional social science. Eight case studies, including the photographs of Walker Evans, the plays of George Bernard Shaw, the novels of Jane Austen and Italo Calvino, and the sociology of Erving Goffman, provide convincing support for Becker’s argument: that every way of telling about society is perfect—for some purpose. The trick is, as Becker notes, to discover what purpose is served by doing it this way rather than that.
    With Becker’s trademark humor and eminently practical advice, Telling About Society is an ideal guide for social scientists in all fields, for artists interested in saying something about society, and for anyone interested in communicating knowledge in unconventional ways.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateAug 5, 2007
    ISBN9780226125985
    Telling About Society
    Author

    Howard S. Becker

    Howard S. Becker is author of many books including Telling About Society, Writing for Social Scientists, and Outsiders.

    Read more from Howard S. Becker

    Related to Telling About Society

    Related ebooks

    Social Science For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      How Social Justice and the Environment Connect

      Nov 19, 2017

      In his new book, author David Pellow argues that environmental issues and social justice are connected. In What is Critical Environmental Justice? (Polity Press, 2017), Pellow, a chair in environmental studies at the University of California, Santa B

      3 min read

    • Article

      How to Be a Writer on Social Media: Advice from Roxane Gay, Alexander Chee, Celeste Ng, and Adam M. Grant

      Jul 10, 2017

      Before social media became the juggernaut it is today, countless authors were skeptical about how it could be, for lack of a better word, useful. Wouldn’t tweeting just be a time-suck? How could Facebook be anything but trivial? By now, most authors

      8 min read

    • Article

      Writing Through The Lens Of Social Justice

      Jun 14, 2021

      Last February, at a virtual event put on by my alma mater, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, I listened to four Black journalists from venues like The New York Times and Washington Post share their insight and experiences on the

      10 min read

    • Article

      Indenture: More Research Is Needed

      Oct 7, 2020

      IN THE trail of Britain’s abolition of slavery in 1834, the colonial government of India oversaw the migration of close to two million Indians signing contracts of indenture up to the end of World War I. The new system of labour provision saw the “mi

      3 min read

    • Article

      Annotate This: On Marginalia

      Jan 17, 2020

      When Shylock gives his celebrated soliloquy—“If you prick us, do we not bleed?”—the previous owner approvingly added in the margins “Bring your own BOOYEA!” The post Annotate This: On Marginalia appeared first on The Millions.

      12 min read

    • Article

      Conferences & Residencies

      Dec 15, 2021

      POETS & WRITERS MAGAZINE ANNOUNCES application information for writers conferences, literary festivals, and residencies of interest to poets, fiction writers, creative nonfiction writers, and translators. Applications for the following events are due

      13 min read

    • Article

      Everything I Don’t Know About Swords: On Teaching Creative Writing

      Mar 19, 2018

      1. One evening in grad school, half-drunk and Googling my own name, I found a blog run by one of my fiction students. I shouldn’t have read it, but of course I read it. “I already hate this class,” she wrote. “My teacher is a stuck-up snob who won’t

      7 min read

    • Article

      Rethinking Heritage

      Dec 24, 2020

      Rethinking Heritage
      5 min read

    • Article

      KEEPING the STORIES

      Jun 15, 2022

      KEEPING the STORIES
      10 min read

    • Article

      Living Memory

      Jun 23, 2021

      Living Memory
      18 min read

    • Article

      The Genre Of Resistance

      Aug 15, 2018

      Mine (University of New Mexico Press, March), a collection of personal, lyric, and investigative essays about ownership—the corporeal, the familial, and the intellectual in form—as well as the realities of loss and isolation and the idea of belonging

      12 min read

    • Article

      Revising One Sentence

      Jun 15, 2019

      Revising One Sentence
      7 min read

    • Article

      80 Years On, Dominicans And Haitians Revisit Painful Memories Of Parsley Massacre'

      Oct 7, 2017

      This week marks the anniversary of the 1937 massacre, in which Dominican soldiers targeted Haitians living near the Dominican-Haitian border. A team from NPR's Latino USA gathered survivors' memories.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Dan Sinykin on Fiction, Scholarship, and Academic Twitter

      Mar 13, 2024

      "Academic Twitter is something of a compulsion for me. My wife hates it." The post Dan Sinykin on Fiction, Scholarship, and Academic Twitter appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      Nick Laird and Zadie Smith

      Nov 2, 2020

      My appreciation for the writing of Zadie Smith began January 30, 2007 at Foyles Bookshop on Charing Cross Road. I spotted the most beautiful book cover I’d ever seen, for a book called On Beauty. I bought the book without knowing anything about Smith

      14 min read

    • Article

      Monument

      Jun 10, 2019

      Around the editorial advisory table at C Magazine, we had long been mulling over the idea of an issue on public art or public space. Last year we finally landed on “the monument” as one of the most consequential areas of discussion to be had around a

      3 min read

    • Article

      From the Editor

      Jul 29, 2019

      From the Editor
      5 min read

    • Article

      Diving Deep

      May 8, 2017

      Serial immersionist TED CONOVER on the connections between anthropology and journalism; knowing when to resist digression; and the importance of writing “across the aisle.” TED CONOVER has spent his entire career delving into different cultural world

      18 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Telling About Society

    5/5

    1 rating0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Telling About Society - Howard S. Becker

      F ^book_preview_excerpt.html[͎Fr~RkWw4FVgm$RM2)&5/`ϱo'EDGv5Udfd|EDx^~^z9~4o~޺m||xd1{ϾmJޥ:Wo?Ƈиc]?f{uu:Ի錧%.i.ݿ9G5!󹿦q:7KwN c\&s9uwn<Δ\1|)!&s!wv~<.R@ ! mp8b',:1OO)W#Ԑк&] _RWq1It÷鞲Rݕ t:Nw9;E z19˓,qp{}u]Jy'z0YUa T]|SORTgs {|<'"ܦPw}nv:3X,6oa0YRC#2A$N3g1|碒{9BUOPy3 68gC;҅[sJrS`-#$nhMƮ/N\E;g| $br(W>- 'UgSýv_i}*pO\N %OcT7qټo".9!/~N /no.i#@чMr^pPwW^s,m4K0R K} DkE\hԝɾ}e!pyz%?JaojSQ#G}I" ąX8NҎ{7C?<+my!@}8sLyINn ZZ|4}M꾝&E:m]>Tw'0VNv6aovFiE> 6/Tǎ7: Gx";1eCJay98(>h71`@bĨ~䩕vG…k!|&Pis8nxL1~f>p1/6?7u޺KP#`_sPN⡫UjiC ow) ,h|Xj']lo1`V$(0$_H=!D-iyҥѼ9YvIpO:,z#Y~$lFR꾍@";dn= L'>6jI.%oEUf5}XS2"*9g> Z ]LL"+GJ7*œif81Sw̘7>a) 7D͉P7l% elt  =Fa"uTyJN8C̲Sۆr/tdT•WkYZ)#~bTR֏⎋%,ۘ&{ycaΛ$MNt? ߅^RtPh+pզ(s{. A^F-.YVP{ˆBl_ nDLJ 5r ГJiajԊU=PNkGe5q=%B[P|+Jŀ D)vԀ>u'o|8s12n)j|SYz]7yRq[* Ț؄pť13H8@#SLd@Gމ\Z"4P7Z.N_7Z´?Rׄbr, ufEic֝V-3X=.]|f!oX֔o":)tC8Xp?msl-/62YXΤ|-CZ+bue | rUl%ʇ:; M~.;λk/5&֣ 53JqTs#V&NgҁmNp앤-5O{HL' 'H]A%5n($3lpB`ސT$[fUR< 6-wmK'NJ٤ n0rr;6 1tp6c֑͞pVⷻа'cZ8!J:磡 R }h X6en r^fPk2 b1gk3\r"#mJdSog8j<$ec "$٧V^9,G4Ģ R8/S\ tgP@-7a -͸֤B}B}8BhAkx{,^ƛݐDR*{]`{I';Xv-#[pd<(y6%T|g6uXc$Mt6⋃2S.1+LnsNX o6/6OHwiJu#z^d\p+H{aMжㅴ!wZ>(QUGĻ6l1, 7՛&ڤ 2'&CDޭ6>)|jllqm0%@<0؟N\2 Ě:IjC(^fHw[خKd\YW O\vxFI' 2}+ܓޥ_ޮn)qI%~AKʚ6>-bӧ?D*j%xCmJT.%+e\uOی#1Nv#j([u5̸7J3yǾ=N$I\! d(n/ڵdZ*5WdG}Ԣ+Vڙi`w;~߁Wf{T8g?R2 }ԓ˖1HA*T7㱰DU1*o7jqSrGWH.G2lg/:[99
      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1