The Winter 2023 Roy A. Rappaport Lectures: “From Small Talk to Microaggression: A History of Scale”
The Winter 2023 Roy A. Rappaport Lectures: “From Small Talk to Microaggression: A History of Scale”
What trouble can come from straining to know a thing closely, "microscopically"? These lectures explore the political, epistemological, and ontological problems caused by observational scale. Since the mid-twentieth century, US social scientists studying face-to-face interaction have been by turns fascinated and frustrated by the "small" scale of their object and the scrutiny it seemed to …
