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The site in Shanksville, PA of the crash of United Flight 93 has received considerably less scholarly and mainstream attention than Ground Zero in New York, but the cultural symbolism and narrative-making being generated there is no less fascinating. From the war on terror catch phrase "Let's Roll!" to the conflict over the initial design of the permanent memorial, the site has been and is the focus of much construction and contestation of symbolic meaning. In this essay, I examine some of the visual evidence of this cultural work and suggest some ways we might attempt to understand how those images are mobilized culturally and how they are made elements in particular narratives about the flight and its ultimate meaning/s. The several images to be looked at here include some from the aftermath of the crash, some from the temporary memorial erected afterward and other commemorative sites in the area (e.g., the Flight 93 Chapel located about three miles from the crash site), and some from the design for the permanent memorial. This is a first and relatively brief sketch of a larger and more systematic study, hence the term "notes" in the title of this article. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been significant recent scholarly interest in reading the Collège de Sociologie of the French inter-war years (and especially its leading figure, Georges Bataille) as an important intellectual point of connection between the Durkheimian school of the pre-WWI period and the post-'68 generation of poststructuralists (see e.g., Gane 1991a and b; Richman 2002). This work, though useful and often ground-breaking, largely concentrates itself in a history of ideas tradition that is centered on texts. I propose that a full understanding of the intellectual genealogy necessitates an interpretive framework more attentive to the sociology of knowledge; that is, a framework sensitive to the actual institutional and other social sites in which the melding of Durkheimian and other (especially Nietzschean) ideas could take place in such a way as to clearly inform subsequent generations of thinkers with a kind of intellectual Zeitgeist that has both textual and lived, experiential, social elements. The journal Critique (which was founded by Bataille in 1946 and later edited by Jean Piel, brother-in-law to both Bataille and Jacques Lacan) serves as one such institutional (if in many ways 'outsider') site. Here, and in a few other sites I examine, the conditions were present for the creation of interaction rituals and the production of a kind of collective memory that linked thinkers of Bataille's generation influenced by Durkheimian thought via Marcel Mauss to thinkers of the post-'68 generation (e.g., Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze) who would absorb these Durkheimian/Maussian elements often without explicitly realizing it. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hip hop culture and rap music have been the object of increasing scholarly attention over the past ten years. While much of this scholarly work has proven useful in understanding this cultural object, it frequently brings a set of theoretical perspectives that distort and limit our understanding of the actual use of rap music in the efforts of members of hip hop cultures toward meaning construction. This paper proposes a cultural sociology of one particularly challenging genre of rap music (?gangsta? rap) that utilizes a set of neo-Durkheimian sources in cultural theory previously unutilized in the study of this particular piece of culture. It endeavors to demonstrate that the set of symbols and meanings invoked by at least some consumers of this culture is potentially very different from those models presented in the existing literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]