(I realize that I haven’t blogged in weeks and now it’s two times in an hour, but bear with me)
Back in my Intro to Soc days I used to have students do this project on stigma.* Within minutes of my last post, a friend shared a link to this little Hollywood adaptation of that assignment (although I had students work in teams of two, not two hundred).
* For those of you without JSTOR access, it’s the exercise from “The Sociology of Doing Nothing: A Model ‘Adopt a Stigma in a Public Place’ Exercise” (Halnon 2001, Teaching Sociology).
5 Comments
I so want to do this. Who’s up for it in chicago?
its a perfect ethnomethodological “breaching experiment”…the best part is listening to the accounts given by the passers-by as they try to make sense of what is going on.
Yes, nonevent, that’s what I used it for in my class… to show that you don’t need to do anything at all to screw with social order or norms, just do nothing.
Awesome. I’m going to go ‘do nothing’ today in the student center after I eat some food.
Improv Everywhere (http://improveverywhere.com/). They’re at the intersection of public art and social commentary –see their Abercrombie event (or whatever they call it). I also like their Slo-Mo-at-Home-Depot (which I’ve just blogged) as a demonstration of relativity.