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"This American Life" Radio Archive and Discussion Questions
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Born out of a car trip listening to "This American Life" on the radio, the idea to use these radio links arose from a desire to allow you to hear and feel ? not just read ? what people experience with issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and class. For each chapter, you will find one or more links to the radio shows, along with discussion questions created by Professor Norm Conti of Duquesne University. "This American Life" is a popular radio show with an unusual format. Each week, the hosts pick a theme and interview people who have some relation to that theme, with the end result of a powerful combination of pathos, humor, and overall learning. To hear the radio links, you must go to the links below to access the streaming MP3 files. Once you are on the Episode page these files can be played by clicking on the blue icon next to the show title We hope you enjoy this experience and find it an effective learning tool for putting the issues discussed in Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Class into personal perspective. Chapter 1: Taking a New Look at a Familiar World This episode, produced only a couple of weeks after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, includes four acts and the text of an article from the Chicago Reader that attempt to convey a sense of what it is like to live in and through a war. In the first act the host discusses what the impending war will be like with a Pentagon news correspondent. The second act attempts to tell us something about the lives of soldiers and their loved ones through the analysis of letters written during the Civil War. Act Three "What Peacetime Forgets About Wartime," is an excerpt from the article "Losing The War" by Lee Sandlin. This is a story that explains the psychological differences between peacetime and wartime based on research on WWII. In the fourth act the dualism of skepticism and patriotism that are so central to the "American character" is explored by a man as he travels across the country conducting interviews. Questions:
Chapter 2: Seeing and Thinking Sociologically Episode 27 — "The Cruelty of Children" This episode, with particular attention to act one "I Like Guys" and three "Human Nature, the View from Kindergarten," examines specific instances of kids being mean to each other. Act One details the experience of an adolescent boy struggling with his gay identity within an intensely homophobic environment. As a result of social forces he is pressured, and conforms, to norms of stigmatizing other boys who display less than masculine selves. Act Three presents the story of a kindergarten teacher who is able to exert a formal social control over the informal relations between her students that leads to a far more civil set of relations between the children. Questions:
Chapter 3: The Social Construction Of Knowledge This episode explores the concept of "decency" in public and political contexts. Act One "The Government Says the Darndest Things," examines the social construction of the concept of decency by the FCC. Recent controversies are juxtaposed with the comments of children in order to illustrate the way in which concepts, as well as norms and laws, are created, agreed upon, and changed over time. The second act examines the way in which a local politician is attacked with profanity for violating the political trends in his district. Questions:
Chapter 4: Building Order: Culture And History Episode 65 — "Who's Canadian?" This episode examines the differences between Americans and the "Canadians among us." The show begins with a discussion of how a variety of cultural products and figures that are so quintessentially American are actually Canadian and what this might mean to our lives and identities as Americans. Later, the program moves on to interrogate the true differences between the two cultures and whether or not Canadians can truly claim a national identity which excludes the American influences upon it. The closing act asks how American migration affects the identities of (former) Canadians. These stories raise very interesting questions about identity, culture, and nationality. Questions:
Chapter 5: Building Identity Episode 233 — "Starting From Scratch" This episode is all about people starting over. The first act details the experience of a man who walks away from a twenty-five year career as an executive in an advertising agency in order to start his own cable channel that would only broadcast the playful antics of a group of puppies. The story allows for a deep and compelling understanding of the man's identity and why this life change was important to him. Act Two "Making Money the Old Fashioned Way," is of a limousine driver in Las Vegas who "hustles" up to 10,000 dollars every day just to gamble it all away by the end of the night. This act is great for demonstrating the work that people put into building their identities. Questions:
Chapter 6: Building Image: The Presentation Of Self This episode is comprised of stories that describe the deeply personal reasons that people have for using false documents and identification while traveling. The episode centers on the narrative of a newspaper reporter traveling to Poland in order to find the family that saved her mother from the Nazi concentration camps in WWII. In her travels she is surprised to find that in the Krakow, a former hotbed of anti-Semitism, Judaism had recently come very much into fashion. These stories have an underlying theme of the presentation of self, impression management, and stigma. Questions:
Chapter 7: Building Social Relationships Episode 209 — "Didn't Ask to Be Born" This is a very powerful episode where two heartbreaking stories of troubled children and their families are told with shocking authenticity. Though the scenarios are tremendously intense and unlike anything that most families will experience, we are able to strongly identify with the people in them and understand how their lives could have taken the turns that they did. The first act tells the story of two sisters who ran away from home and live on their own for an extended period of time following their parents' divorce and relocation to another city. In the second act, we listen to a deeply personal account of a boy with "everything" going for him who takes an unimaginable step to throw it all away. Questions:
Chapter 8: Constructing Difference—Social Deviance This entire episode is devoted to the story of how the concept of homosexuality was demedicalized and shifted to the status of lifestyle rather than deviant act. The story is told by the granddaughter of the psychiatrist who was the president elect of the American Psychiatric Association at the time of the movement to have homosexuality removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for psychiatry and psychology. The narrative includes detailed accounts of people on both sides of the larger social movement that personalize and provide nuance to the larger cause. This story is an excellent example of the politics of deviance. Questions:
Chapter 9: Organizations, Social Institutions, And Globalization This episode is solely devoted to the story of an executive at the multinational food company Archer Daniels Midland, who inadvertently ends up as an undercover informant for the FBI. This informant was able to compile hundreds of hours of audio and video recordings of the men behind the corporation engaging in blatantly criminal behavior. This episode provides an interesting case of how organizations function within the larger social structure and how individuals maneuver within organizations. Questions:
Chapter 10: The Architecture Of Stratification This episode is based on the recordings made over the course of six months by an African-American single mother. The show begins by exploring the politics and mythology that surrounds the very notion of being an "African-American single mother." Acts One and Two detail the woman's personal history and daily struggle as she works to earn a living and see to it that her teenage son graduates from high school. Questions:
Chapter 11: The Architecture Of Inequality (Race And Ethnicity) Episode 105 — "Take a Negro Home" This episode presents two contemporary stories that exemplify the significance of the racial divide in society. Act One "Interracial Marriage" tells the story of a racially mixed couple who married during the civil rights movement under the assumption that the country was becoming more racially integrated and progressive. Three children and one divorce later, their son Rich seeks to understand the function of race in his parents' divorce and return to their racially separated worlds. Act Two "Economic Integration," tells the story of a young man who grew up in one of the poorest communities in the country and still managed to earn a spot in an Ivy League university, only to realize that the personal strengths that allowed him to escape the ghetto, make him an outcast in the elite circle. Questions:
Chapter 12: The Architecture Of Inequality (Sex And Gender) Episode 99 — "I Enjoy Being a Girl, Sort Of" The focus of this episode is what it means to be a woman and a girl. The program begins with a discussion of how much more important the role of personal style and body image is for women/girls than men/boys. Act One "Fatty Suit" is the story of a woman who manipulates her physique via costuming in order to comically demonstrate the double standard around weight and beauty that women are forced to bear. Act Two "How to be a Man," examines the practical mechanics of gender performance. Act Three "Strength in Numbers," is the story of lifelong friendships between nine women. Act Four "Taking Sisterhood One Step Further," focuses upon the dynamics that develop within a group of women who are taking part in a polygamous marriage to the same man. Questions:
Chapter 13: The Global Dynamics Of Population This episode deals with an immigration law that is unfair, almost universally opposed, and has only a negative impact upon society but continues to be enforced. The show looks at a specific county in Massachusetts where the consequences of this law are readily apparent. Questions:
Chapter 14: Architects Of Change: Reconstructing Society Episode 250 — "The Annoying Gap Between Theory… and Practice" This episode explores the dilemmas faced by individuals pursuing some type of social change. Act One "Rock, Paper, Computer," explains the difficulty in implementing computerized voting. Act Two "Detroit Is in the House," is drawn from three days spent with a state representative who ran for office with the hopes of being able to improve things for his local neighborhood once he was elected. This story brings up the issue of how attempting to change things from within impacts the self within the individual. Questions:
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. You should first make sure you have an MP3 player on your machine. You can choose whichever one you like; some of the most common players include iTunes, Windows Media Player and Quicktime. You can do a Google search to find free downloads of whichever you choose. If you are interested in visiting the site or finding more episodes, please go to 