Citings and Sightings

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics; Image: Lam Thuy Vo

Over at NPR’s Planet Money Blog, reporter Lam Thuy Vo takes a quick look at some of the latest statistics from the Bureau of Labor to look at how women’s role in the economy (at least, on the employment side) has changed since 1972—coincidentally, the year the House and Senate both passed the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have mandated equal pay for equal work, but was not ratified by the states within the federal 10-year deadline.

Despite lacking legal backup in the fight against sex discrimination, women have certainly made strides in workforce participation in these forty years. They’ve gone from just 36.1% of the American workforce in 1972 to almost an even split at 49.3% in 2012. Vo further breaks out the gender division in workers across sectors for an interesting look at changing economies. It’s certainly worth a visit to look at not only how women’s roles in certain job categories have changed, but also how the proportion of those jobs in the American economy as a whole have changed in just four decades.

An aerial map, analyzed by @thejaymo, of the annual Burning Man festival, a festival and utopian community based around public art. Photo © GeoEye, coded for Hexayurt Density.

While yesterday’s article from The Atlantic, “The Rise of the Temporary City,” never addresses utopianism, we still think Erik Olin Wright, American Sociological Association president and champion of the study of “real utopias” would be pleased with the rise of “temporary urbanism.” In the piece, which jumps off of the new book The Temporary City, author David Lepeska points out that pop-up cities are nothing new (the World’s Fair’s various incarnations spring to mind), but the recent spate of pop-up stores, restaurants, and the like seems to be breathing new life into these short-lived utopias.

The truly quick cities—week-long urban malls, for instance—are intriguing on their own, but urban planner Peter Bishop tells The Atlantic that it’s the “grander, longer-lasting temporary projects that have begun to alter thinking in the field.” Various projects cited include London’s “Boxpark,” in which “60 shipping containers have been turned into shops with three or five-year leases… in large part due to the open-mindedness of the landowners”; the now-permanent Camden Lock Market, which has “helped rejuvenate an overlooked neighborhood”; and even city-wide projects like Washington, D.C.’s Temporary Urban Initiative, meant to help developers overcome the slow pace of owner approval, permitting, and zoning for such projects.

The author points out that whether the pop-ups are just a passing revival of a past fad remains to be seen and will likely be measured by scholars like Bishop on “the extent to which major colleges and universities incorporate temporary concepts into their curriculum, and uptake among municipal officials.” Still, “temporary urbanism offers an innovative way to use vacant space, generate revenue, and boost property values in a downturn.”

Further, such projects offer an excellent experimental space in which to create, from the ground up, a new community and see how it plays itself out: real utopias in action. If, as Wright instructs, we should study operational utopias (like Copenhagen’s Christiania, which has been in operation as a squatter settlement since the early 70s) in order to be ready to take action when opportunities arise to improve our larger communities, we could do worse than to study the temporary urbanism of the 21st century.

Maternity Ward Cartoon by Mike Kline, dakinewavamon.blogspot.com

Kudos to University of Illinois sociologist and Council on Contemporary Families head Barbara Risman for putting pen to paper (or fingers to keys, more likely) for CNN.com in an insightful commentary about why it is that the so-called Mommy Wars are a distraction—and how they’re keeping us from truly addressing work-life balance in the United States.

In her short piece, Risman points out just four of the many contradictions between society’s values and actions that put the lie to the valorization of care-giving, using research from sociology and beyond to demonstrate that post-war workplaces don’t (and, quite possibly, can’t) serve millenial families. In one particularly telling example, Risman writes:

Sociologist Mirra Komarovsky pointed out these contradictions back in 1953. She argued back then that if society truly believed caretaking was an important and difficult job, nursery school teachers would rate a salary at least equal to the beginning salary of a street cleaner. Not much has changed since then. As Stephanie Coontz, a historian and co-chair of the Council on Contemporary Families, told me: “It’s time for politicians to stop competing over the women’s votes and start competing over who has the best programs to support all parents, whatever their employment status or their gender.”

She concludes with a succinct call to action: “Let’s call a truce on the fictional mommy wars and start a war on workplaces that don’t allow mommies and daddies to live full lives, on the job and at home.”

The promotional image for HBO's documentary series "The Weight of the Nation."

While it’s still hotly debated whether obesity is, in fact, a health crisis, in today’s New York Times, one-time food critic Frank Bruni considers recent obesity research in evolutionary science, medicine, public health, and beyond, concluding that it will require society-level change if we are to stem “a near inevitable tide.” (See also his blog post from today, “The Girth of the Globe,” which discusses Bruni’s perceptions of American dietary habits in a larger context.) The Centers for Disease Control, Bruni writes, now considers about two-thirds of Americans overweight or obese, but “Our current circumstances and our current circumferences may in fact be a toxically perfect fit.”

This is to say, learning to perfect agriculture in abundance has created “plump savings accounts of excess energy” in both our grain silos and our love handles “for an imagined future shortage that, in America today, doesn’t come.” Bruni interviews John Hoffman, an executive producer on HBO’s forthcoming documentary series “The Weight of the Nation,” who tells him that “We’ve only known a world of plenty for maybe 100 years. Our biological systems haven’t adapted to it.” And quoting from Michael L. Power and Jay Schulkin’s book The Evolution of Obesity, Bruni adds, “We evolved on the savannahs of Africa. We now live in Candyland.”

Bruni goes on in his op-ed to consider how one problem in fighting obesity is that we must eat:

“When it comes to smoking or drinking, people generally have to go cold turkey,” notes David Altshuler, an endocrinologist and geneticist, in the documentary. “But fundamentally, we have to eat.” Every meal is a… feat of calibration. “We underestimate how hard it is to change your behavior not once—not for a week or a month until you’re cured—but to change it every day for the rest of your life,” says Altshuler.

In conclusion, Bruni writes we must understand this paradox, cease to vilify the obese, and “rethink and remake our environment much more thoroughly than we seem poised to do.” This may, perhaps, be true well beyond Americans’ own equators.

Just gotta find the gold one... Photo by takingthemoney via flickr

One of the main goals of the Citings & Sightings section at The Society Pages goes beyond simply spotting social scientists and their work in the news to finding great uses of social scientific perspectives and findings in reporting on the issues of the day. To further highlight those journalists and outlets that are doing a top-notch job of giving their work nuance and scientific grounding by reaching out to well-spoken, approachable, and even daring social scientists, we are proud to announce the winners of our inaugural TSP Media Awards for Measured Social Science for the months of January and February 2012.

January 2012: Lauren Collins, “Brave New World: The Tao of Wifi.” New Yorker, December 5, 2011. As we wrote in our post on the piece, “It’d be easy to think that Georg Simmel hasn’t been the talk of the town since he took on Kant, but there he is, resplendent in the New Yorker’s front section.” In this article, Collins not only explores an interesting social phenomenon, but she asks an urban studies professor and draws on classic sociological work to consider something that could be easily overlooked, but turns out to be interesting, revealing, and even deeply funny.

February 2012: Greg Breining, “Higher Ed Leans Left. By Why? And So What?” Star Tribune, January 28, 2012. Written up for Citings & Sightings by Alex Casey, this op-ed goes beyond simply reporting Neil Gross and Solon Simmons’ findings on the political bent of the professorial ranks to seeking out social scientists to discuss why the ivory tower might lean left and whether it has any implications for the education provided at institutions of higher ed.

Now, just a note on process: with these informal awards, we hope to hand out some cheers, but we have no grand aspirations to offer cash prizes or trophies (though, oh, how we long to have gold-plated teaspoons to hand out to the lucky and deserving winners!), we simply wish to encourage journalism that engages social science. That said, we’re not being very scientific about the selection: there’s been no systematic review of all the newspapers (even Sarah Palin’s not up to reading all of them), nor have we performed any content analysis searching for “Weber” and “social capital.” Instead, we’ve talked—a lot—as a board, winnowed down our favorites to a set of nominees, and then talked some more. Each month, we’ll announce a new winner and encourage you to go read their piece. We think it’s worth your time!

All the best,

The Society Pages

Poor sleep is said to affect everything from productivity to anxiety (not to mention anxiety about productivity), and worse still, it’s believed to affect, oh, nearly everyone. But could this modern malady have a historical cure?

The BBC reports that historians and sleep scientists alike are increasingly convinced that all evidence points to a preindustrial pattern of bimodal or segmented sleep. That is, as historian Roger Ekirch reported in his 2005 book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, before lights and blinking devices filled our days and nights, weary bodies would fall into a sleep pattern that included some sleep when it got dark, then a period of wakeful (but still restful–sometimes including chatting with bedfellows or sex) time sometime during the night, and one more deep sleep before dawn. By the end of the 1600s, the article says, most European cities were lit at night, and, ever since, our pattern has been dashed. Our cities never sleep, and it seems we don’t do a good job of it either.

Now, as countless doctors recommend a standard 8 hours of sleep each night (and gently chide those who admit to more or less than that number), a psychological study from the 1990s, performed by Thomas Wehr (now an emeritus scholar with the National Institute for Mental Health), is being coupled with historical research like Ekirch’s to revive the idea that humans are built for a much different sleep pattern than we generally follow today. In Wehr’s study, subjects were kept in the dark for 14 hours a day. It was a tough adjustment, no doubt, but soon they fell into an easy and uniform cycle that looked just like what Ekirch had found in heaps of historical references: sleep, quiet wakefulness, and sleep.

A sociological look at sleep by Simon J. Williams can be found in the Winter 2011 issue of Contexts, as well.

Photo by Josh Parrish via flickr.com

In explaining the purpose of a “whiteness studies” course—the kind offered at dozens of colleges and universities in the United States—Alex P. Kellogg of CNN.com writes:

The field argues that white privilege still exists, thanks largely to structural and institutional racism, and that the playing field isn’t level… educators teach how people of different races and ethnicities often live very different lives… The field has its roots in the writing of black intellectuals such as W.E.B. DuBois and author James Baldwin.

Still, “In the past, detractors have said the field itself demonizes people who identify as white.” So, then, how did the courses manage to continue, and why are they seemingly on the way out now?

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a sociologist at Duke and the University of Pennsylvania, tells the reporter:

Having Obama is, in a curious way, putting us behind… You have a growing racial apathy. People are telling you, I don’t want to hear about race, because we’re beyond that… But we still have a white America and a Black America.

Another sociologist, Charles Gallagher of Philadelphia’s La Salle University, said that he still has to convince his students that inequality exists. “Gallagher, whose latest book Retheorizing Race and Whiteness in the 21st Century was published last year,” writes Kellogg, ” is teaching intro to sociology and urban sociology classes this semester, and while neither is strictly about race, he says he will make a point to talk about modern day racism and white privilege.” Still, “he expects his students—and increasingly, some who are black—will be there ready to push back, particularly on the notion that race still determines your lot in life.” Gallagher asks:

How do we talk about race or racism in the United States if people think racism is gone?

The article moves on to discussing whether, rather than being privileged, whites, as some suggest, are actually racially oppressed. Charles Mills, a philosopher at Northwestern, argues, Kellogg says, “that whites in particular have a self-interest in seeing the world as post-racial. In that world, everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed… your success in life [is] not determined by race, but by how hard you work.”

Even as classes on whiteness studies instead seem to be dissolving into interdisciplinary race courses which take the time out to discuss persistent white privilege, academics tell CNN.com that “in the past, conservatives derided whiteness studies as anti-white, but the sharp vitriol against the discipline has largely subsided,” and the field “continues to evolve.” As Kellogg concludes, “While the filed is still little known in some corners, and criticized as being obsolete in others, proponents of… whiteness studies say that’s all part of progress.”

In a brand new piece for Slate, journalist Libby Copeland marshals the social scientific evidence to ask whether, as in so many other areas of social life, looks matter in politics. It’s been, she writes, “conventional wisdom” since the televised Nixon-Kennedy debate in 1960 (see clip above) that a candidate in the modern age simply can’t avoid the fact that their very face will affect their polling numbers. Put more provocatively, Copeland asks, “How much does Newt Gingrich’s face hurt him?”

What’s really intriguing here, though, is that the assumption, for the longest time, was that it was attractiveness or beauty that would confer an advantage to the aspiring politico. To be sure, “Attractive people appear to benefit in all sorts of situations, like in the workplace and legal situations. Heck, even babies are predisposed to focus on good-looking faces,” Copeland writes. But 2005 research from Princeton’s Alexander Todorov and other researchers asserted “voters appeared primarily drawn to faces that suggested competence,” not a Crest commercial smile and perfect symmetry. “The competent face shape,” Copeland gleans, “is masculine but approachable, with a square jaw, high cheekbones, and large eyes. When people say Romney just looks presidential, this is the image they’re summoning.”

In follow-up studies, political scientists went on to confirm the Todorov findings, but refined them, pointing out that it was mainly less-informed voters who watched a lot of television who demonstrated the “competent face” effect. Copeland goes on to explore some other studies in psychology and political science which subtly altered the images of real politicians (in one case, even blending it with the study subject’s own photograph—”After all, who’s more competent and trustworthy than you?” the author asks) to consider other ways that looks shape elections. She concludes:

Taken all together, these new studies suggest how a politician’s face appeals to voters, or doesn’t, can’t be boiled down to just one factor. Rather, voters look at a candidate and make a series of instant judgments based on a number of traits. Then… they listen to the candidate, they consider the issues, and they do all the things rational voters are supposed to do. Skin-deep inferences aren’t all that voters rely on, though they may have an outsized effect on the decision-making process.

Racism Moves Out, peterthomasryan.com

Not only are we excited to spot Reynolds Farley’s Contexts article “The Waning of American Apartheid?” (Summer 2011) written up in the Emerging Ideas section of the Jan.-Feb. 2012 issue of the Utne Reader, we’re gratified to see the elegant treatment it’s received in this “Citings & Sightings” style piece. Further, the illustration (at left, by Peter Thomas Ryan, peterthomasryan.com) wittily gets at the heart of the matter. What more could an editorial team want?

In the piece, the author writes of Farley and his fellow researchers’ extensive longitudinal work:

The stats aren’t evidence of a racial utopia (50 percent of thse respondents hit the edge of their [neighborhood] comfort zone at a 50-50 split in racial composition), but from block to block, there does seem to be slow and steady progress toward a more racially integrated America.

To check out the original article, please visit contexts.org.