e-mail me at billdeg@umich.edu

11/17/2011

what have I been reading?

Join the Club, by NYTimes' Tina Rosenberg, which I'm reading with my first-year comp students. Rosenberg posits the "social cure" as an effective strategy for social change, telling loads of stories of successful organizing where the success stemmed directly from the social capital gained by a sense of community. Rosenberg argues that peer pressure represents positive potential. Pretty good stuff.

Also reading various texts about Shi'a in Lebanon and Hezbollah specifically. The best has been Max Weiss' In the Shadow of Sectarianism, though I also made my way through Zahera Harb's Channels of Resistance in Lebanon and Eitan Azani's Hezbollah: The Story of the Party of God, the latter providing really useful context but succumbing to significant bias in its discussion of the contemporary situation in "the south." Been doing some extra reading to add to what I'm learning in the Lebanese history class I've been auditing and, ultimately, trying to contextualize my understanding of Mleeta (the "Hezbollah museum"), which I've been trying to write about (may turn into an article).

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