Public Information
A May, 2008, press release showing relatively long-term, broad support for North Carolina public employee collective bargaining is here.
Professional Information
You can view my Curriculum Vitae by clicking here. You'll need to download a suitable PDF reader, such as the
Adobe Acrobat
Reader or XPDF to view them.
In 1991-92, I worked for The Namibian
, an independent newspaper in Windhoek, Namibia.
I graduated from Swarthmore College in 1994 and spent the following summer working for the Grassroots Policy Project on labor-environment coalition building in the Great Lakes. I am now a Senior Research Fellow at GPP.
I then moved to Rochester, New York, where I worked for Tex-Port, Inc., doing
computer repairs and support. My biggest customer was Electronic Data Systems (EDS), which in turn was under contract to support three General Motors units in the Rochester area.
I got my Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley in 2001.
In addition, I used to do various computer work for the Demography department and consulting work for DHL World Airways.
I filed my dissertation and received my Ph.D. in Berkeley in May, 2001. Some further projects I'm either considering or actively working on include:
- CodeRead, my computer software for text analysis. It is currently moribund, although I do hope to return to development at some point.
- A study of letters to the editor as a form of public deliberative discourse
- A study of the Open Source movement as a case of social movement behavior
I have recently begun reading a variety of sociological and political blogs; my list to pay attention to is here. Periodically I post at Scatterplot.
UNC issues and resources
- Click here for information on my classes.
- Click here for the open letter to Chancellor Moeser regarding funding proposals that affect the curriculum.
- Click here for an informal questionnaire and responses from candidates for faculty governance office in spring, 2006.
Publications and Related Materials
- Coser, Rose Laub, Laura Anker, and Andrew J. Perrin. Women of Courage: Jewish and Italian Immigrant Women in New York
- Perrin, Andrew J.
Citizen Speak: The Democratic Imagination in American Life (University of Chicago Press, 2006)
- Texts of the scenarios used for my 2000 focus groups in Alameda County,
California, can be found here.
- Papers of mine available on the Web:
- Symbolic Politics in the Information Age: The '96 Campaigns On-Line
(No longer available online - see Information, Communication, and
Society 3:1 (2000))
-
Terror, Fetish, Fantasy, and Reification:
Violence and Meaning in the Namibian Independence Movement, from the
(Dis)Placing
Nationalisms Conference at UC Irvine in 1996.
Personal Information
My parents own a house in Wellfleet, Cape Cod, which is available for rental. More information can be found at http://perrin.socsci.unc.edu/coserhouse.
Computer Tips
I am a Linux snob; my home, office, and laptop computers all run versions of
Debian Linux. I also seek (more or less
successfully) to use as much free software as I can,
and to contribute to free software if and when I can. As a practical matter,
I tend to help more with documentation and help than with coding, since my
programming skills are sub-par.
Some of my most commonly used free software packages are:
I've posted some random computer tips, many of them relating to Perl and Samba. There's also some information on using linux, particularly Debian, on the UNC campus and on UNC's CCI desktops.
You can get that stuff here.
Websites I maintain or am involved with include
Culture Web, the official site
of the Culture Section of the American Sociological Association; and
North Carolina At Work, a clearinghouse
for information on unions and workplace issues in North Carolina.
Other Websites Hosted Here
This is my personal server, used for research and experimental
purposes. Other sites hosted here include the
database containing information on the book
review section of Social
Forces (http://perrin.socsci.unc.edu/socialforces)
and various online surveys for my research.
Andrew Perrin,andrew_perrin@unc.edu
