[NEWS] Five links about identity: Durkheim, working-class, Petra Köpping, Dominican Republic, space

[rfmcdonald]

• Galen Watts at The Conversation takes a look at our world in the light of Émile Durkheim's sociology, arguing that the decline of the sacred in public life has opened the world up to new forces. What next?


• This Justin Quarry essay, republished at The Guardian, arguing that it can be more difficult for people like him to come out as working-class than as gay is provocative.


• Christine Keilholz has written a widely-syndicated article about Petra Kôpping, the integration minister of Saxony, who finds herself dealing as much with older East Germans who lost from reunification as with new immigrants to her state.


• This VICE article takes a look at the humanitarian disaster created by the Dominican Republic's destruction of birthright citizenship, displacing hundreds of thousands of people from their country on account of their foreign (Haitian) origin.


• Nadia Drake at National Geographic argues that the language used to describe space settlement has to be chosen carefully, that avoiding the rhetoric of past imperial conquests is a must.