Re: [xmca] Re: Events: Assistance requested

["Engeström, Yrjö H M" <yrjo.engestrom@helsinki.fi>]

MIke, the historian/historical sociologist William H. Sewell, Jr. has built much of his theory of history on the concept of event. See for example:

-Sewell, W. H., Jr. (1996). Historical events as transformations of structures: Inventing revolution at the Bastille. Theory and Soecity, 25(6), 841-881.

-Sewell, W. H., Jr. (1996). Three temporalities: Toward and eventful sociology. In T. J. McDonald (Ed.), The historic turn in the human sciences. University of Michigan Press.

Cheers,

Yrjö





On Feb 13, 2013, at 7:26 PM, mike cole wrote:

> This is all very helpful. I recommend that stanford encyclopedia entry for
> a way to think about the
> span of levels and range of phenomena to which we apply the term, event.
> 
> Note that in Pepper's "world hypotheses" view, "the event" is the unit of
> analysis of contextualism.
> 
> hmmmm
> mike
> 
> On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 8:40 AM, Helena Worthen <helenaworthen@gmail.com>wrote:
> 
>> Mike-
>> 
>> One form of "event planning," which I assume includes everything from
>> kid's birthday parties to a ride at Disneyland to political conventions,
>> is theater production. From the job description point of view, the person
>> listed as "producer" for a play is responsible for everything from raising
>> the money, writing the budget, choosing the play and publicizing it,
>> hiring the director and other technical staff and shaping how it is
>> interpreted by the media and finally deciding when it closes and paying
>> off (or apologizing) to the investors. As Jim Mackenzie, who was Producer
>> at ACT in San Francisco once said, "Sometimes all you have to do is say
>> 'Let's do it' and sometimes you're sewing on the zippers."
>> 
>> When I googled "theater production", however, I saw that theater
>> departments who teach production focus on what goes on backstage --
>> costumes, wigs, makeup, set design, lighting. That's much narrower than
>> what a producer does. No useful book showed up.
>> 
>> Nonetheless, theater might be a good way to talk about event planning
>> because of a key feature of  both: they are both bounded by the audience's
>> or the participant's, encounter with them. They require taking the
>> audience's perspective from the first awareness (pre-publicity) all the
>> way through to the memory of the event.
>> 
>> I found this perspective useful when producing the annual conferences for
>> labor educators, which were very successful and drew increasing numbers of
>> participants over the four years I was doing it.
>> 
>> Helena Worthen
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On 2/12/13 3:57 PM, "mike cole" <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> Ah! Well, I started to send this note to all of you, then decided to send
>>> to daughter, but ended up sending to all of you after all, so here is the
>>> problem. Delete if this is an intrusion on your time.
>>> 
>>> I am teaching a class where students are interest in an activity called
>>> "event planning" for which people are sometime paid enough to make a
>>> living. The difficulty is that the students do not
>>> appear to have been taught anything they can remember about
>>> events and this is a senior class. So I am doing some digging with them,
>>> and now with you.
>>> 
>>> The dictionary is of limited use:
>>> * *
>>> *a. * Something that takes place; an occurrence.
>>> *b. * A significant occurrence or happening. See Synonyms at
>>> occurrence<http://www.thefreedictionary.com/occurrence>
>>> .
>>> *c. * A social gathering or activity.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> A philosophical dictionary lays out the problem territory in greater
>>> detail: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/events/#EveVsObj
>>> 
>>> For events of type c, which the students are most concerned with of
>>> course,
>>> my thought was to turn to the work of Turner, Goffman..... but I cannot
>>> use
>>> an entire book.
>>> 
>>> I would appreciate suggestions for sources that would help me and my
>>> students to think about events, especially as they relate
>>> to a process called communication.
>>> 
>>> mike
>>> __________________________________________
>>> _____
>>> xmca mailing list
>>> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>>> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>> 
>> 
>> 
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