Social Friction

All Articles of Social Friction

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The Social Construction of Laughter: How Power Dynamics Shape Satire, Irony & Humor

Teaser When is a joke funny—and when does it cross the line into cruelty? This question haunts every...
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When the Self Can No Longer Cope: A Sociological Reading of Dissociative Identity

A Sociological Perspective on Multiple Personality Parts Teaser When social demands become unbearable,...
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Writing and Drawing Against the Self: Creative Expression as Social Practice in an Opaque World

Teaser “As long as I write and draw, my brain doesn’t turn against me.” This raw...
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Between Two Worlds: Educational Upward Mobility and the False Choice of Class Betrayal

Teaser First-generation students from non-academic households face a painful paradox: university promises...
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Between Waking and Dreaming: The Social Construction of Sleep in the Age of 24/7 Capitalism

Teaser Sleep represents “the last bastion of non-capitalistic society” in our relentlessly...
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When The Machine Stops: Forster's Prophetic Vision Meets Our Algorithmic Present

Teaser In 1909, E.M. Forster imagined humanity living in isolated cells, entirely dependent on an omnipresent...
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Twenty Seconds on Your Lips, Twenty Years on Your Hips: The Sociological Economics of 'Free Lunch' Illusions

Teaser Two proverbs haunt modern consumer society: “Twenty seconds on your lips, twenty years...
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The Friction Between Normal and Abnormal: From Foucault's Asylum to Maté's Toxic Culture

Teaser Who decides where the line between sanity and madness falls? From medieval fool’s freedom...
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The Pendulum of Open Society: Between Foucault's Oscillation and Poe's Descent

Teaser For decades, Western democracies celebrated their trajectory toward openness—expanded rights,...
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When the Self Dissolves: Identity Fragmentation Between Social Voices and Clinical Reality

Alt text: Abstract representation of identity fragmentation showing a central self dissolving into scattered...
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Questions about Ernie & Bert

(rev. by Claude.ai) Thoughts about a Queer Counterpublic A Sociological Seminar Paper Abstract This...
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Membranes of Meaning: How Social Systems Create Friction Through Inclusion and Exclusion

Teaser Every social system draws a line. Inside: recognition, participation, belonging. Outside: invisibility,...
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Transaction Costs, Agency, and Games: Why Social Friction Persists

Teaser When people and organizations coordinate, they don’t only trade goods—they trade information,...
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Mead’s I/Me/Self: Friction, Membranes, and Role-Taking

Teaser George Herbert Mead helps us see why social life both binds and rubs. The self forms in interaction:...
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Motivation Letter to Students

Queer Counterpublics: From Sesame Street Questions to Stadium Chants Can an innocently phrased question...
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Questions about Ernie & Bert - Recommended Reading Order

Ernie loves the playful “why not?”, Bert defends the steady “we don’t do it like that.” Between them...
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On the Street: Counterpublics in Conversation — A Fictional Interview Experiment (Enriched Teaching Version)

Note: This is a fictional, AI-generated dialogue and analysis, produced under the Social Friction methodological...
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Questions about Ernie & Bert - a Conclusion to Queer Counter Publics

A Small Defense of Friction If you ask a child about Ernie and Bert, you don’t get a treatise on the...
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9. The roll-back: right-wing counterpublics and reactionary friction

Teaser Counterpublics aren’t automatically emancipatory. Since 2015, grievance-driven right-wing formations...
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8. Market Capture and Its Discontents

Teaser Following Alexandra Chasin’s critique of “marketed gayness,” parts of the queer movement risk...
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7. Lil Nas X and “Industry Baby”: queer counterpublic & Eminem's whiteness over market

Problem space. Both artists use spectacle to move rap’s center. But the identity lever differs: whiteness...
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6. AI Biases: Building a Queer Counterpublic Under Data Scarcity (v1.2, enriched)

Teaser AI doesn’t just “mirror” the world; it encodes erasures. When queer lives—especially at the...
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5. Football/soccer: queer counterpublics in male-dominated arenas

Teaser Stadiums are high‑intensity norm‑policing machines—chants, banners, ritualized masculinity....
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4. Sesame Street as parable: the Ernie–Bert question

Teaser The periodic public fascination with Ernie & Bert is not trivia. It is a soft‑focus case...
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2. bell hooks: from margin to center as a communication ethic

Teaser How do marginalized voices speak without being consumed by the very structures they contest?...
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1. Habermas and Why Counterpublics Matter for Social Friction

Teaser How do we turn conflict into institution‑learning rather than reputational combat? Habermas’s...
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Questions about Ernie and Bert!

Thoughts about a queer counter public Teaser What if the debate about whether Ernie and Bert are...
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Counterpublics, Friction, and the Habermasian Public Sphere

Why Minkoff matters for Habermas’ counterpublics Debra C. Minkoff’s work shows how movements...
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Anxiety and Social Friction: From Social Panic to German Angst

Teaser Anxiety is not just “in the head.” It is co-produced in bodies, interactions, and institutions....
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The Myth of Normal: Rules for Healing Social Friction

Teaser I take Gabor Maté’s diagnosis seriously: a society can turn “toxic” when acceleration, performance,...
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Conflict as Social Friction: Why Rules Matter More Than Tempers

Teaser I argue that conflict is not a bug but a structural feature of social life. Following Dahrendorf,...
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Social Friction & Depression: Institutions, Interactions, and the “Black Guest”

Teaser I look at depression through a sociological lens: how rules, rhythms, and expectations create...
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Stigma and Social Friction: Where “Normal” Draws Its Lines

Teaser I ask how stigma—for example around stuttering—creates social frictions, frontiers, and daily...
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A Midnight Guide to Bach, Fugue, Social Friction—and AI

Teaser I look at social friction with help from Bach’s Art of Fugue. A fugue is music where several...
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A Roundtable with Eribon, Bourdieu, and Foucault in our Social Friction House.

The dialogue is a crafted scene and therefore marked [HYPOTHESE]. Teaser I stage an extended conversation...
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John Rawls take on social friction

Teaser From a Rawlsian angle, social friction is the everyday sign of reasonable pluralism—and the...
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A Marxian Counterpoint to Weber

Teaser What Weber called “meaningful co-orientation,” I read as material contradiction. In this essay...
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Social Friction: A Weberian Consideration

Preliminary remarks on method The following inquiry proceeds ideal-typically. I do not claim to portray...
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Towards a Sociology of Friction

Teaser Social Friction is my lab for the productive tension of social life. I examine how frictions...

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