Whirling Dervish

WD is on a bit of a hiatus from blogging, so these numbers are really, really old. I’d bet they have increased by a power of ten by now!

The cold hard numbers of graduate school

Pages read: 8299
Pages written: 480
Courses taken: 11
Credits taken: 33
Years in program: 1
Courses Taught: 1
Essays Graded: 591
Publications pending: 1
QP Proposal Submitted: 1
External Funding $ awarded: $2,500
GA Positions: 1

More About Whirling Dervish’s Graduate School

Updated March 2008

WD is especially interested in the intersection between health & medicine and social control, especially as it relates to psychiatric diagnosis. She just completed writing three preliminary papers on this general topic. One is an experimental design to see if prior psychiatric diagnosis or criminal history influences psychiatric diagnosis, the second is a historical look ofthe professional ideologies that were used to promote the exclusion (and later inclusion) of patients diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder within the psychiatric community, and the third examines the rise of spectrum and subthreshold conditions, and the social control and economic effects of this shift from the “discrete diagnosis” paradigm. She is also starting to become interested in the nature of belief, and has written a preliminary paper about different tactics of maintaining belief when empiricle evidence disputes a groups’ claims.
She is also preparing for publication an earlier paper about mate selection and age preference in dating partners. The paper is a critique of the sociobiological concept that mate selection is based on perceptions of fertility and fecundity, and instead, using gay males as the sample case, argues that mate selection is entirely culturally constructed from heternormative principals. This paper places mate selection in an exchange theory/rational choice model, arguing that reproductive fitness is only one of the characteristics being exchanged.

Book list for Semester 2:
Book Reports for Mid term of Semester 2
Book Reports for Semester 1:
Read my end-of term book report for the following books here:
Ideology & Curriculum by Michael Apple
Sociology of Georg Simmel by Kurt Wolff
Conflict and Web of Group Affiliations by Georg Simmel
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber
Civilization and its discontents by Sigmund Freud Suicde by Emile Durkheim
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life by Emile Durkheim
Mind, Self, & Society by George Herbert Mead
Constructing Social Research by Charles Ragin
Methods for Discovery: Heuristics for the Social Sciences by Andrew Abbott
Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth by Claude Fischer
Revolutions and Rebellion in the Early Modern World by Jack Goldstone
Insurgent Identities: Class, Communiity, and Protest in Paris from 1948 to the Commune by Roger Gould