I periodically ask myself what are the top 10 books, movies, songs, pieces of visual art, television series, etc. that have influenced me and why? This exercise forces me to reexamine these items more closely, critically answer why I thought they were important, and why they may be better or worse than other creative works on my lists.
After considerable reflection, one of my top books is Ted Robert Gurr’s, Why Men Rebel (1970). His seminal scholarship (and other publications that he authored, co-authored, edited or co-edited) motivated me to reach out to him as I was completing my bachelors degree, express an interest in doing a masters under his guidance, and for Gurr to recruit me as his first graduate student at University of Colorado Boulder, where he relocated to in the mid-1980s.
During my graduate career, not only did I complete my masters thesis and doctoral dissertation under Gurr’s direction, co-author with him, but benefited from Gurr’s mentorship too.
Turning to the book, Why Men Rebel, was important during its day (garnering the American Political Science Association Woodrow Wilson best book of the year award), but as testament to its importance today, and as of this writing Why Men Rebel has 11,523 citations on Google scholar.
In short, Why Men Rebel attempts to answer a very simple question, one that has become increasing important to ask over that past five decades.
The book consists of ten chapters beginning with a chapter titled “Explanations of political violence” and ending with one on “Causes and Processes of Political Violence.” At the time this was one of the most comprehensive books. After an extensive review of competing explanations, drawing most from the social sciences, Gurr settles on the concept of relative deprivation (as the most important reason why individuals and collectivities engage in political violence against the state.
He begins by arguing that that frustration-anger-aggression undergirds most political violence, but not everyone who experiences this state of affairs automatically engages in violence. Moreover, frustration-aggression (for short) must be coupled with a feeling of relative-deprivation (i.e., a perception that compared to others who are similar to you and your group, your lot in life is less than satisfactory). Gurr then introduces the reader to the importance not just of different contexts, but how important elements of violence and the processes that lead up to it like scope, intensity, and duration commingle and effect the pattern of violence.
This background information is necessary to understand why some types of political violence (e.g., insurrections, oppositional political terrorism, coups d’etat) are more frequent in some countries or societies, during different periods, than others. And why in other contexts all that we may see and experience are things like acts of resistance, political protests, etc.
Undoubtedly, and in hindsight the book has a handful of drawbacks and criticisms.
To begin with the book is half a century old. And thus a considerable amount of scholarship (e.g., biological) has been conducted since that time, some of which has competed with Gurr’s explanations why people decide to engage in political violence against the state.
Others have, in my opinion, wrongly inferred that the title of the book meant that Gurr’s explanation was directed towards men, or that he was somehow gender blind. Moreover, those expecting a page turner will not find it here. On the other hand, the book is methodical, sometimes boring, but this is to be expected with this kind of careful scholarly analysis.
Overall the advantages outweigh the drawbacks. To begin with Why Men Rebel is one of a handful of comprehensive explanations in an increasingly crowded scholarly field. Gurr’s approach was also truly interdisciplinary. Per Gurr’s style, he reviewed a considerable amount of social science scholarship that dealt with this subject, pointed out its merits and shortcomings, and then outlined a series of hypotheses amenable to empirical testing. Unlike many scholars who produce similar kinds of work, and to his credit, not content to leave his work as a a book treatment, Gurr subsequently invested considerable resources testing the numerous propositions statistically and modified his perspective when the evidence was not compelling.
Why Men Rebel is worth reading not simply as a parsimonious explanation for political violence, but as a model of comprehensive social science scholarship.
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/Screen-Shot-2023-04-04-at-9.42.10-AM.png646578Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2023-04-06 14:02:352023-04-06 15:52:59On the importance of Ted Robert Gurr’s WHY MEN REBEL
Over the past half century, not only has there been an increase in the amount and types of graffiti and street art appearing in large urban centers, but so too has attention paid to this type of urban public art.
One of dominant questions, however, that pervades this activity is why do people and groups engage in graffiti and street art?
Temporarily setting aside definitions of graffiti and street art, since the emergence of these activities, one of the dominant perceptions is that graffiti and street art are acts of resistance.
Indeed a considerable amount of graffiti and street art has been produced during major social and political revolutions, protests (e.g., Black Lives Matter), and campaigns of resistance (e.g., against the Russian Invasion of Ukraine), etc. (thus leading to the term conflict graffiti), but there is a significant amount of graffiti/street art that is put up that bears no connection to these types of events.
Thus to suggest that all work done by street art luminaries such as Banksy or Shepard Fairey, for example, are works of resistance is a gross simplification of their body of work.
Based on similar arguments, some graffiti and street art practitioners and observers, will go so far as to suggest that graffiti is resistance, but street art is not. This, they argue, is tied to their unique (often non generalizable) definitions of these practices.
The reality is that some, but not all, graffiti and street art are acts of resistance, and thus to imply or infer that all graffiti and street art falls in to this category is probably some combination of romanticism and sloppy homework.
The latter argument probably derives from a failure to (or poor execution there of) to talk with, interview, or observe individuals who engage in graffiti/street art, or to immerse oneself in the scholarly literature on this subject.
I suspect that some of the people who subscribe to the graffiti and street art is resistance also suggest that all crimes are acts of resistance. An argument left for another day.
Notwithstanding the fact that many graffiti writers and street artists may have difficulty articulating why they do this sort of activity, in principle, there are as many different causes (i.e., anger, fun, sneaky thrills, recognition, etc.) as there are people who engage in this activity.
In short, whether we are talking about the causes of graffiti and street art or almost any kind of human behavior we should be careful and suspicious about any sort of monocausal explanations, Often times the message is ambiguous and thus to infer that resistance is the only or most dominant cause should be questioned.
Photo Credit: Daniel Lobo
#resist
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/25336115647_e0e7ff607b_o-scaled.jpg17072560Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2023-03-30 16:44:222023-04-06 13:45:19Questioning graffiti and street art as acts of resistance
One of the earliest dishes I learned to prepare was spaghetti. My efforts involved opening up a can of Chef Boyardee, and heating it up in a sauce pot.
Soon I gravitated to boiling supermarket bought packaged dried pasta, warming up a can or jar of spaghetti sauce, placing it on top of the drained spaghetti, and finishing it off with a sprinkle of Kraft parmesan cheese.
Over time, I experimented with various brands and different types of dried pasta, added a variety of ingredients to the store bought sauce to make it more interesting, and topped off the concoction with selected types of parmesan.
This ritual progressed to making pasta with cottage cheese, or heating up olive oil in a pot or pan, adding the cooked pasta, and then some salt and parmesan to the dish.
Despite trips to Italy where not only did I eat some of the best pasta in the world, but once spent a delightful afternoon, in a small hillside southern Italian town, making pasta from scratch, under the direction of the aging aunt of one of my friends, my pattern of heating up dried pasta, and dousing it with prepared spaghetti sauce persisted for a number of years.
For example, once a week, when my wife would work late, and it was my turn to feed our children, boiling dried pasta and covering it with canned spaghetti sauce was my fall back/go to meal of choice to cook.
But over the past decade not only do supermarkets from Whole Foods to Trader Joes sell dried pasta made out of different ingredients (e.g., rice, etc.), and “fresh pasta” that one can cook at home, but I also started to deliberately improve my cooking skills.
To be fair, cooking fresh pasta presents a slightly different set of challenges, than cooking package dry spaghetti, linguine, fettuccine, etc., but ones that appeared to be easy to master.
Recently, however, I decided to purchase and cook freshly made (and relatively expensive) Pappardelle (pasta), (which is about eight inches in length and laid out in consecutive U shaped rings), from a well-respected local purveyor of Italian food.
At the time I believed that the biggest challenge was deciding among which type of sauce (i.e., tomato, ricotta cheese, or mushrooms) that I would finish the pasta with.
But that was just the beginning of my temporary culinary decent into hell.
I assumed that I knew how to cook the Pappardelle. I had seen my wife cook this dish numerous times and thought it was a no brainer. Or how difficult could this be?
One of my biggest mistakes, however, was assuming that the pasta showed up on the plate the way it was nicely laid out on in the plastic container in which it was bought and that there was no need to separate the individual strands of pasta as they entered the boiling pot of water. I also reckoned that it was not necessary to put oil in to the water and felt confident enough that it was neither necessary for me to consult a recipe or a youtube video that would walk me through how to cook it.
The result was a big mess of cooked pasta that was all stuck together.
Always willing to deconstruct what worked and did not work for me in the kitchen, I asked myself why did things backfire on me, and what deeper meaning could I derive from this experience?
There are about three competing hypotheses.
First, my failure, could be attributable to my white, middle-class male sense of confidence. Although this may be true, I think this explanation does not hold much water (boiled or not).
Second, the outcome could be attributed to the way I conceptualized the challenge. This is the notion of framing. Since I had cooked both packaged hard pasta and fresh pasta before, I assumed that my biggest challenge would not be cooking the pasta, but orchestrating the sauce.
Third, and more likely is something akin to the Dunning-Kruger effect that suggests that people with low skills, ability, and expertise often tend to overestimate their ability. Yes, I am learning how to improve my ability to cook Japanese food (in particular Washoku), but that doesn’t mean that my knowledge and skills are immediately transferable to other types of food and cuisine.
In skills acquisition and performance, there are always blind spots, and this was one of them for me.
What lessons can be learned as I go forward?
In the future, although it’s important to experiment and not shy away from trying new things and methods, it’s also wise to not assume that just because I have some expertise in one area, that it is easily generalizable to another. More specifically, as DK experts will tell you, in order to minimize this effect, it’s wise to:
Recognize that you may have a bias;
Try to get feedback (in this case early on before you destroy the pasta);
Ideally this feedback is from people who are recognized experts in the relevant field;
Commit yourself to continuously learn more and improve your skills;
And most importantly be humble.
Photo Credit
Goya60
Italian Chef 1
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/Screen-Shot-2023-03-22-at-11.06.19-PM.png466528Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2023-03-23 03:31:062024-09-15 12:11:56Pasta, Pappardelle, and the Perils of Overconfidence
On the importance of Ted Robert Gurr’s WHY MEN REBEL
/by Jeffrey Ian RossI periodically ask myself what are the top 10 books, movies, songs, pieces of visual art, television series, etc. that have influenced me and why? This exercise forces me to reexamine these items more closely, critically answer why I thought they were important, and why they may be better or worse than other creative works on my lists.
More specifically. a number of books have significantly shaped my scholarship, including not only what I’ve chosen to study, but how I conduct research on that topic.
After considerable reflection, one of my top books is Ted Robert Gurr’s, Why Men Rebel (1970). His seminal scholarship (and other publications that he authored, co-authored, edited or co-edited) motivated me to reach out to him as I was completing my bachelors degree, express an interest in doing a masters under his guidance, and for Gurr to recruit me as his first graduate student at University of Colorado Boulder, where he relocated to in the mid-1980s.
During my graduate career, not only did I complete my masters thesis and doctoral dissertation under Gurr’s direction, co-author with him, but benefited from Gurr’s mentorship too.
Turning to the book, Why Men Rebel, was important during its day (garnering the American Political Science Association Woodrow Wilson best book of the year award), but as testament to its importance today, and as of this writing Why Men Rebel has 11,523 citations on Google scholar.
In short, Why Men Rebel attempts to answer a very simple question, one that has become increasing important to ask over that past five decades.
The book consists of ten chapters beginning with a chapter titled “Explanations of political violence” and ending with one on “Causes and Processes of Political Violence.” At the time this was one of the most comprehensive books. After an extensive review of competing explanations, drawing most from the social sciences, Gurr settles on the concept of relative deprivation (as the most important reason why individuals and collectivities engage in political violence against the state.
He begins by arguing that that frustration-anger-aggression undergirds most political violence, but not everyone who experiences this state of affairs automatically engages in violence. Moreover, frustration-aggression (for short) must be coupled with a feeling of relative-deprivation (i.e., a perception that compared to others who are similar to you and your group, your lot in life is less than satisfactory). Gurr then introduces the reader to the importance not just of different contexts, but how important elements of violence and the processes that lead up to it like scope, intensity, and duration commingle and effect the pattern of violence.
This background information is necessary to understand why some types of political violence (e.g., insurrections, oppositional political terrorism, coups d’etat) are more frequent in some countries or societies, during different periods, than others. And why in other contexts all that we may see and experience are things like acts of resistance, political protests, etc.
Undoubtedly, and in hindsight the book has a handful of drawbacks and criticisms.
To begin with the book is half a century old. And thus a considerable amount of scholarship (e.g., biological) has been conducted since that time, some of which has competed with Gurr’s explanations why people decide to engage in political violence against the state.
Others have, in my opinion, wrongly inferred that the title of the book meant that Gurr’s explanation was directed towards men, or that he was somehow gender blind. Moreover, those expecting a page turner will not find it here. On the other hand, the book is methodical, sometimes boring, but this is to be expected with this kind of careful scholarly analysis.
Overall the advantages outweigh the drawbacks. To begin with Why Men Rebel is one of a handful of comprehensive explanations in an increasingly crowded scholarly field. Gurr’s approach was also truly interdisciplinary. Per Gurr’s style, he reviewed a considerable amount of social science scholarship that dealt with this subject, pointed out its merits and shortcomings, and then outlined a series of hypotheses amenable to empirical testing. Unlike many scholars who produce similar kinds of work, and to his credit, not content to leave his work as a a book treatment, Gurr subsequently invested considerable resources testing the numerous propositions statistically and modified his perspective when the evidence was not compelling.
Why Men Rebel is worth reading not simply as a parsimonious explanation for political violence, but as a model of comprehensive social science scholarship.
Questioning graffiti and street art as acts of resistance
/by Jeffrey Ian RossOver the past half century, not only has there been an increase in the amount and types of graffiti and street art appearing in large urban centers, but so too has attention paid to this type of urban public art.
One of dominant questions, however, that pervades this activity is why do people and groups engage in graffiti and street art?
Temporarily setting aside definitions of graffiti and street art, since the emergence of these activities, one of the dominant perceptions is that graffiti and street art are acts of resistance.
Indeed a considerable amount of graffiti and street art has been produced during major social and political revolutions, protests (e.g., Black Lives Matter), and campaigns of resistance (e.g., against the Russian Invasion of Ukraine), etc. (thus leading to the term conflict graffiti), but there is a significant amount of graffiti/street art that is put up that bears no connection to these types of events.
Thus to suggest that all work done by street art luminaries such as Banksy or Shepard Fairey, for example, are works of resistance is a gross simplification of their body of work.
Based on similar arguments, some graffiti and street art practitioners and observers, will go so far as to suggest that graffiti is resistance, but street art is not. This, they argue, is tied to their unique (often non generalizable) definitions of these practices.
The reality is that some, but not all, graffiti and street art are acts of resistance, and thus to imply or infer that all graffiti and street art falls in to this category is probably some combination of romanticism and sloppy homework.
The latter argument probably derives from a failure to (or poor execution there of) to talk with, interview, or observe individuals who engage in graffiti/street art, or to immerse oneself in the scholarly literature on this subject.
I suspect that some of the people who subscribe to the graffiti and street art is resistance also suggest that all crimes are acts of resistance. An argument left for another day.
Notwithstanding the fact that many graffiti writers and street artists may have difficulty articulating why they do this sort of activity, in principle, there are as many different causes (i.e., anger, fun, sneaky thrills, recognition, etc.) as there are people who engage in this activity.
In short, whether we are talking about the causes of graffiti and street art or almost any kind of human behavior we should be careful and suspicious about any sort of monocausal explanations, Often times the message is ambiguous and thus to infer that resistance is the only or most dominant cause should be questioned.
Photo Credit: Daniel Lobo
#resist
Pasta, Pappardelle, and the Perils of Overconfidence
/by Jeffrey Ian RossOne of the earliest dishes I learned to prepare was spaghetti. My efforts involved opening up a can of Chef Boyardee, and heating it up in a sauce pot.
Soon I gravitated to boiling supermarket bought packaged dried pasta, warming up a can or jar of spaghetti sauce, placing it on top of the drained spaghetti, and finishing it off with a sprinkle of Kraft parmesan cheese.
Over time, I experimented with various brands and different types of dried pasta, added a variety of ingredients to the store bought sauce to make it more interesting, and topped off the concoction with selected types of parmesan.
This ritual progressed to making pasta with cottage cheese, or heating up olive oil in a pot or pan, adding the cooked pasta, and then some salt and parmesan to the dish.
Despite trips to Italy where not only did I eat some of the best pasta in the world, but once spent a delightful afternoon, in a small hillside southern Italian town, making pasta from scratch, under the direction of the aging aunt of one of my friends, my pattern of heating up dried pasta, and dousing it with prepared spaghetti sauce persisted for a number of years.
For example, once a week, when my wife would work late, and it was my turn to feed our children, boiling dried pasta and covering it with canned spaghetti sauce was my fall back/go to meal of choice to cook.
But over the past decade not only do supermarkets from Whole Foods to Trader Joes sell dried pasta made out of different ingredients (e.g., rice, etc.), and “fresh pasta” that one can cook at home, but I also started to deliberately improve my cooking skills.
To be fair, cooking fresh pasta presents a slightly different set of challenges, than cooking package dry spaghetti, linguine, fettuccine, etc., but ones that appeared to be easy to master.
Recently, however, I decided to purchase and cook freshly made (and relatively expensive) Pappardelle (pasta), (which is about eight inches in length and laid out in consecutive U shaped rings), from a well-respected local purveyor of Italian food.
At the time I believed that the biggest challenge was deciding among which type of sauce (i.e., tomato, ricotta cheese, or mushrooms) that I would finish the pasta with.
But that was just the beginning of my temporary culinary decent into hell.
I assumed that I knew how to cook the Pappardelle. I had seen my wife cook this dish numerous times and thought it was a no brainer. Or how difficult could this be?
One of my biggest mistakes, however, was assuming that the pasta showed up on the plate the way it was nicely laid out on in the plastic container in which it was bought and that there was no need to separate the individual strands of pasta as they entered the boiling pot of water. I also reckoned that it was not necessary to put oil in to the water and felt confident enough that it was neither necessary for me to consult a recipe or a youtube video that would walk me through how to cook it.
The result was a big mess of cooked pasta that was all stuck together.
Always willing to deconstruct what worked and did not work for me in the kitchen, I asked myself why did things backfire on me, and what deeper meaning could I derive from this experience?
There are about three competing hypotheses.
First, my failure, could be attributable to my white, middle-class male sense of confidence. Although this may be true, I think this explanation does not hold much water (boiled or not).
Second, the outcome could be attributed to the way I conceptualized the challenge. This is the notion of framing. Since I had cooked both packaged hard pasta and fresh pasta before, I assumed that my biggest challenge would not be cooking the pasta, but orchestrating the sauce.
Third, and more likely is something akin to the Dunning-Kruger effect that suggests that people with low skills, ability, and expertise often tend to overestimate their ability. Yes, I am learning how to improve my ability to cook Japanese food (in particular Washoku), but that doesn’t mean that my knowledge and skills are immediately transferable to other types of food and cuisine.
In skills acquisition and performance, there are always blind spots, and this was one of them for me.
What lessons can be learned as I go forward?
In the future, although it’s important to experiment and not shy away from trying new things and methods, it’s also wise to not assume that just because I have some expertise in one area, that it is easily generalizable to another. More specifically, as DK experts will tell you, in order to minimize this effect, it’s wise to:
Recognize that you may have a bias;
Try to get feedback (in this case early on before you destroy the pasta);
Ideally this feedback is from people who are recognized experts in the relevant field;
Commit yourself to continuously learn more and improve your skills;
And most importantly be humble.
Photo Credit
Goya60
Italian Chef 1