Concerned about the increasingly hostile split between two political camps in the United States, sociology professor Arlie Russell Hochschild spent several years in Louisiana talking with people on the other side of what she calls her “empathy wall.” Hochschild selected the state because it presented an extreme example of “the great paradox,” as illustrated by Alec MacGillis of the New York Times: “People in red states who need Medicaid and food stamps welcome them but don’t vote…while those a little higher on the class ladder, white conservatives, don’t need them and do vote—against public dollars for the poor.” Discussions of Hochschild’s award-winning work will be participant-led. Required: Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (The New Press, 2016).
