And Another Thing
Channel: LIVING SOCIOLOGY
Date: 2019-12-11

First Person, Plural on CFUV-fm, Victoria, BC 
Originally aired August 29, 2002

Astronomically, summer doesn't end until September 22 with the autumn equinox. But culturally, Labour Day and the return to school signify the end of summer for most of us.  We've spent the summer of 2002 producing First Person, Plural.  Today we revisit some of the hotter issues of the summer. 

Enron. WorldCom. Time/Warner/AOL. Arthur Anderson.  On May 23, we talked about the level of trust needed in order to make commerce work.  Trust is fast becoming the single most important business issue of this summer.  We revist the idea of economic trust in light of the summer's events.  Can the American capitalist power elite solve its own problems?

Baseball is on the verge of yet another strike. On June 13, we spoke with University of British Columbia baseball coach, Terry McKaig, about how professional baseball affects Canadian college baseball.  Why does it seem that professionalizing a sport leads to the transformation of that sport into something other than a sport?  How does commercialization and professionalization affect amateur sports?

Since World War II, people have begun to question modern ideas that were previously held as truth.  In the late 1970s, the Quebec government commissioned French philosopher, Jean Francois Lyotard, to examine the current and future state of knowledge with implications for education.  Lyotard made a case that grand narratives have lost their power to legitimize knowledge.   With the loss of a trust in these grand narratives, many disciplines lack solid ground to stand upon.  Lyotard proposed that paralogy has the potential to replace grand narratives as a way to determine what is legitimate knowledge to pass onto university students. On July 4, we discussed one of the bigger grand narratives, the rights of people to rebel against an unjust government. We further explore what paralogy means and how useful the concept is in light of major conflicts in the world.

copyright: Carl Wilkerson and Pattie Thomas

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