The Editors' Desk

Finishing Strong

Here in Minnesota it appears (knock on wood) that the terrible long winter is behind us–which means that finals are upon us, commencement is coming, and grades will soon be due. And even as academic terms wrap up all over the country, the Pages remain vibrant. Highlights from the past week include:

–a public criminology post on the new Minnesota law that makes it illegal for employers to ask about an applicant’s criminal history until an interview is granted or a job is offered;

–the introduction of a brand new TSP blog, Walt Jacobs’s “Dispatches from a New Dean”

–and the two latest “data based” columns from cyborgology–one on health, the other on love;

Digging back in the archive a bit, you might also take a look at Jennifer Lee’s provocative piece on Asian American exceptionalism and what she calls “stereotype promise“–which we are re-releasing now with video!

The bad news is that our great friend is heading out of town. The spine-crushingly good news is that Professor Walt Jacobs will now be contributing regularly to the TSP community pages, in his Dispatches from a New Dean. A sociologist and recent chair of African and African American Studies in Minnesota, Walt’s just starting a new job as the social sciences dean at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside.

As you might have heard in his podcast on race and comedy, Walt has a keen eye and ear for the telling detail. He’s also a terrific academic leader, who uses sociology to good advantage in organizing people and resources. In Dispatches, Walt will be sharing these experiences, showing how a good social scientist wrestles with the demands and opportunities of higher administration. I’ve never met anyone in academic administration who worked harder or with greater sensitivity to the needs and interests of a larger community. Did you hear the line about commitment and breakfast? [That is, in a bacon and egg breakfast, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.] Well, Walt is committed. He’s heading off to Wisconsin and, by all reports, living amongst the first-year sociology students. We’re sorry to see him go, but so happy he’s staying on TSP.

creative commons photo by brad stabler

Well, our TSP offices are buzzing about the announcement of Sociological Science, an exciting new open-access research publication. There’s a very accomplished editorial team in place, with a clear commitment to “speed, access, debate – and a light touch” — fine attributes for journal editors, as well as guitar players. To keep everything free and open-access, the project will be supported by submission and publication fees charged to authors, rather than subscription fees or association dues.

Sociological Science is distinctive in positioning itself as a rigorous peer-reviewed outlet for primary research. Our friends Jenn Lena, Brayden King, Mike3550, and many others have already offered thoughtful posts and comments. I too have loads of advice for the editors, but I suspect they’re getting enough advice already (and the really useful stuff is best conveyed off-line). Instead, I’ll just offer a few words for the new journal’s prospective authors and readers.

Try to remember that editing any sort of publication is a labor of love, since the ratio of effort to reward (however defined) is usually pretty high. I can see that the team has already invested a lot of thought and hard work  in the venture already. This is especially the case with a DIY effort, so let’s cut the new editors a little slack as they get off the ground. It is always easy to find fault with something in a publication (you call that kerning? how could the first issue completely *ignore* the Freedonian situation?), but initiatives like this are almost always undertaken with a civic-minded/public-goods orientation. I guess I do have one suggestion to pass along to the editors: celebrate each milestone, well and often!

End the Semester Right: With a Movie

What’s that you say? You’re swamped, your students are swamped, and everyone needs a chance to coast into summer? Final papers, class reflections, formal and informal evaluations—there has to be a better way!

There is, and I believe we all know it as: show a danged movie. And here at TSP, we like to provide inspiration. At the bottom of today’s roundup, there’s a list of 56 documentaries and other films that have been recommended to us as excellent fodder for crim, soc, social movements, gender, media studies, and every other class you might be teaching or taking. To learn more, visit this interview with Jessie Daniels and its extensive comments with suggestions from other profs and students (many with links) or this older post with some more good choices.

Now, here’s what we’ve been doing as the semester winds down:

The Editors’ Desk:

“One More Shout-Out for Ethnography Article,” by Doug Hartmann. Why that Atlantic article was so very, very good.

Citings & Sightings:

“An Opinion on Public Opinion Polls,” by Carolyn Lubben. Herb Gans in the Neiman Journalism Lab on why public opinion reports can be awfully misleading.

“Feeling Good with God,” by John Ziegler. You guys, we found the perfect picture for this piece on mental health and religiosity.

Office Hours:

“David Leonard on Jason Collins,” with Kyle Green. Gender, sport, sexuality, media, stigma, this interview has it all.

A Few from the Community Pages:

• Girl w/ Pen. Deborah Siegel kicks off Girl w/ Pen’s tenure with her first of a new series of columns on thought leaders and articles you should know about. She starts with Judith Warner’s new Center for American Progress Report.
• Sociological Images. One of the more disturbing sociological images we’ve seen in a while, “Women as Literal Targets of Misogyny,” has been flying around the web this week (and comes with the biggest and most literal trigger warning we can come up with). In the meantime, Gwen Sharp takes a look at changing U.S. racial demographics, while Lisa Wade schools us on Why Sociology is Awesome and why Occidental College has some ‘splaining to do as the faculty take a vote of no confidence in their administrators.
• Cyborgology. The quantified self and weigh-ins, whether Reddit can self-police on racism,  why MOOCs give some the willies, and why a bombing suspect’s selfie is, literally and sociologically, front-page news.

Scholars Strategy Network:

“Why Autonomous Social Movements Hold the Key to Reducing Violence Against Women,” by S. Laurel Whedon and Mala Htun.

“Black Politics and the Origins of America’s Prison Boom,” by Michael Javen Fortner.

And now, the Movie Pile:

• The End of Poverty?
• Garbage Dreams
• The Road from Crime
• 49 Up
• The Split Horn: Life of a Hmong Shaman in America
• Quiet Rage
• The Devil’s Playground
• We Live in Public
• HIP-HOP: Beyond Beats & Rhymes
• Southern Comfort
• The Pill
• Chisholm ’72: Unbought & Unbossed
• Heart of the Game
• An Inconvenient Truth
• The Lottery (a good alternative, Jessie Daniels says, to Waiting for Superman)
• Resolved
• Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo
• Omar and Pete
• The Dhamma Brothers
• The Farm
• Writ Writer
• Ghosts of Attica
• Manufactured Landscapes
• Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills
• The War Room
• Flow: For Love of Water
• Secret of the Wild Child
• Ikiru
• The Seventh Seal
• Of Gods and Men
• Tell Me a Riddle
• Dead Man
• Race: The Power of an Illusion, pt. 3
• The Color of Fear
• Food, Inc.
• The Battle for Whiteclay
• Inside Job
• Harvest of Shame
• American Harvest
• The Harvest/La Cosecha
• New Harvest, Old Shame
• Carolyn Liebler suggests clips from Little Miss Sunshine, Wedding Crashers, Ghostbusters, and Fiddler on the Roof
• At the River I Stand
• Merchants of Cool
• Occupation: Dreamland
• Stonewall Uprising
• Generation M: Misogyny in Media & Culture
• The Mickey Mouse Monopoly
• Iron Jawed Angels
• Tough Guise: Men and Masculinity in Media
• Further Off the Straight & Narrow
• Makers
• Zeitgeist: Moving Forward
• Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky
• Forks over Knives
• Pull of Gravity

Field research photo by Nicolas Nova via flickr.Just

Just one more, late addition to last week’s round-up: the TSP Media Award for an article in The Atlantic earlier in the spring. The piece described the growing trend in market research of hiring anthropologists to do fieldwork on how people actually use and talk about the products they consume.

In addition to the phenomenon itself, there was a lot of great food for ethnographic thought in the piece. Some highlights include: (more…)

Turn, Turn, Turn

Well, it seems to be winter again in Minnesota. It snowed last week about this time, then we had a day of spring, followed by two 80-degrees-and-sunny days, a rainy couple, and now, we’re back to winter. Two-day seasons, and the leaves couldn’t bud fast enough to change colors. You can imagine how we might get a bit down with this Seasonal ADD.

But then something awesome happened: this week marked the addition of the fine feminist blog Girl w/ Pen to our roster of illustrious “Community Pages”! Please do go visit their new digs and start reading. We got so distracted ourselves that the roundup is quite quick! (more…)

I’m not sure it qualifies as an actual war, but politicians such as U.S. Representative Lamar Smith and Senator Tom Coburn have certainly been firing broadsides at the National Science Foundation and social science research. So it is heartening to hear President Barack Obama single out the social sciences in his speech at the 150th anniversary meeting of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday. The President pledged to protect peer review and research integrity:

With all the one of the things that I’ve tried to do over these last four years and will continue to do over the next four years is to make sure that we are promoting the integrity of our scientific process; that not just in the physical and life sciences, but also in fields like psychology and anthropology and economics and political science — all of which are sciences because scholars develop and test hypotheses and subject them to peer review — but in all the sciences, we’ve got to make sure that we are supporting the idea that they’re not subject to politics, that they’re not skewed by an agenda, that, as I said before, we make sure that we go where the evidence leads us.  And that’s why we’ve got to keep investing in these sciences. 

And what’s true of all sciences is that in order for us to maintain our edge, we’ve got to protect our rigorous peer review system and ensure that we only fund proposals that promise the biggest bang for taxpayer dollars.  And I will keep working to make sure that our scientific research does not fall victim to political maneuvers or agendas that in some ways would impact on the integrity of the scientific process.  That’s what’s going to maintain our standards of scientific excellence for years to come.

Some sociologists will bristle because we weren’t enumerated alongside psychology and political science, while others will surely take issue with the President’s emphasis on hypothesis testing. I’m just glad to hear such a clear statement of support for the social sciences and the integrity and independence of the NSF review process — especially in light of Representative Smith’s draft “High Quality Research Act.”

Well, the TSP headquarters are abuzz: Girl w/ Pen has arrived! Our newest Community Page, Girl w/ Pen consistently makes good on its aim of bridging feminist research and popular reality. Their interdisciplinary team of writers and editors is exceptionally accomplished and prolific, and we’ve been fans for years.

GWP is an important go-to resource for gender scholars, but its clear writing and engaging style attract a much broader general readership. Take a look at just a few recent posts: Virginia Rutter’s Nice Work column breaks down and explains a new Gender & Society piece on overwork and gender segregation; Adina Nack’s Bedside Manners column examines condom distribution in Catholic colleges; Heather Hewitt’s Global Mama takes up the future of online feminism; Susan Bailey’s Second Look considers women’s history month; and founding editor Deborah Siegel details her TEDxWindyCity project on gender in early childhood. But this really just scratches the surface—the site boasts at least a dozen regular columnists, writing such columns as Body Language, Body Politic, Girl Talk, Global Mama, Mama w/ Pen, Off the Shelf, Pop Goes Feminism, and Science Grrl.

We owe special thanks to TSP’s web editor Jon Smajda and the entire GWP team for managing the transition to The Society Pages. We’re delighted to be working together!

Clear Points, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose

When the media flat-out gets your research wrong or presses it into service in an argument that’s the opposite of what you’ve found, it’s hard to get stoked about taking journalists’ calls. But, as pay walls become costlier and less permeable, I’ve got one key, if difficult, bit of academic advice: start giving away the punchline.

Your abstract is now your calling card. “I present findings, discuss implications, and suggest directions for future research” is not a sufficient closing sentence when you may only have 250 words to say what your paper is about, what makes it special, what it actually means. This is to say, if you’re not clearly giving away information in the one place you can*, it’s your fault if others get it wrong. Of course, they still might use your findings in really dumb ways. No controlling that. (more…)