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!

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!

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:

• the discussion of how the co-founder of one of these companies was enamored with German philosopher Martin Heidegger and his insistence on the difference between the objective attributes of things and the deeper subjective meanings attributed to them by end users
• how much market research lacks the “human factor” for grasping how people actually use and understand the goods and products they buy and consume
• the messy, complicated research processes of going beyond and behind the numbers and statistics to understand the special importance that people assign to various objects and things in their houses, for products ranging from from vodka and kitchen appliances to televisions and to computers and Coca-Cola
• the “discovery” that finding out that what consumers say they want is often different from “what their actions reveal about the social effect[s] they crave” in buying and using a product
• the tensions between academic and corporate anthropology (and the parallels in this debate to discussions in sociology about the value of applied and public forms of our scholarly practice)

The Atlantic article was smartly written and came with some uncommonly insightful lines (for example, on Heidegger): “ReD offers businesses Heideggerian analysis, which sounds even more improbable to a scholar than to a layperson.”

Two things prompted me to want to offer one final shout-out to the piece. One is that after a decade’s long hiatus I’m teaching the graduate ethnography seminar in here at Minnesota again and we had a great roundtable discussion of fieldwork with students, faculty, and our distinguished keynote speaker Javier Auyero at our department’s annual research symposium last Friday afternoon. It all made me want to proclaim: “Fieldworkers, Unite!”

The other is that Chris and I have been talking a lot and posting some on certain disturbing developments (NSF funding, STEM initiatives, the Supreme Court) that call into question our national understanding of and commitment to the social sciences. Reflecting over the weekend, it seems so strange, ironic, or almost comical to see hard-nosed, bottom-line corporate America finding value and relevance in one of the softer, more interpretive of our methods even as our public leaders seem to be wondering about the authority and value of the social sciences on a much larger scale.

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!

The Editors’ Desk

“Welcoming Girl w/ Pen to TSP!” by Chris Uggen. In which we expand our global empire (yes, we enjoy hyperbole. Why do you ask?).

“President Obama on NSF and the Social Sciences,” by Chris Uggen. In which all the bad news about federal funding is infiltrated by a wee ray of light. Some might call it hope.

Office Hours

“Catherine Squires on Race and the Media,” by Rahsaan Mahadeo. In which the author of “Coloring in the Bubble: Perspectives from Black-Oriented Media on the (Latest) Economic Disaster” joins in on our podcast.

Reading List

“Stepping Stones or Dead Ends?” by Erin Hoekstra. In which a scholar checks out mobility and “brown-collar” jobs.

Teaching TSP

“Welcome Girl w/ Pen!” by Hollie Nyseth Brehm. In which Brehm shows off some of the teaching resources available to readers of our latest Community Page.

A Few from the Community Pages

• Sociological Images. An instructor talks about verbal consent with her class and finds a range of opinions; SocImages rounds up the month of April; and Lisa Wade and Hanna Rau take a look at how we think transnational adoption looks.
• Girl w/ Pen. They’re just joining TSP, but Girl w/ Pen comes on strong with their first official Community Pages post, “Small Change, Big Wins.”
• Sociological Lens. More on the school-to-prison pipeline.
• ThickCulture. Using Mad Men to consider slut-shaming and second-wave feminism.
• Cyborgology. What’s not true about the “digital divide” and how Facebook promotes cyberbullying.

Scholars Strategy Network

“The Tea Party and the Revival of Paranoia in U.S. Politics,” by Christopher S. Parker. Who’s paranoid? I’m not paranoid. Why are you looking at me like that? Big government.

“What Research Tells Us about Living a Productive and Satisfying Old Age,” by Lenard W. Kaye. Eat your vegetables and exercise? Dammit!

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.”

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!

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.

And now, what we’ve been controlling in the past couple of weeks:

The Editors’ Desk:

“Help SocImages Find a New SocImage!” by Letta Page. In which we try to tap into a broad readership in the hopes that you’ll share ideas and rough sketches for a new SocImages logo.

“Going Big with Online Learning and Teaching,” by Doug Hartmann. In which the Times checks out MOOCs.

“They Like Us! They Really Like Us!” by Doug Hartmann. In which we earn the adjective “award-winning.”

Changing Lenses:

“Lost in Translation,” by Doug Hartmann and Wing Young Huie. In which Wing and Doug consider advertising and stereotypes.

Reading List:

“Ladies in the Red,” by Kia Heise. In which Dwyer, Hodson, and McCloud find even college debt is gendered.

“When a Person Becomes a ‘Health Threat‘,” by Shannon Golden. In which Trevor Hoppe investigates the community health effects of sanctions and stigma.

Citings & Sightings:

“March 2013 TSP Media Award for Measured Social Science,” by Carolyn Lubben. In which Graeme Wood gets into corporate anthropology in The Atlantic.

“The Dirty World of Sanitation Work,” by Evan Stewart. In which NYU’s Robin Nagle studies another group of invisible workers: garbage collectors.

“Fieldwork Fouls,” by Andrew Wiebe. In which, dammit. Really? Social scientists and PhD students are getting sexually harassed—by each other—in the field. C’mon, everyone.

“Do Sisters Have to Do It for Themselves?” by Evan Stewart. In which a journalist calls on research from friends-of-TSP to talk about young women’s expectations and priorities around careers and relationships.

“Guilty Pleasures No More?” by Carolyn Lubben. In which titillating TV works on women, too. Oh, and reflects at least someone’s reality. I’ve never watched “Gigolos,” but I feel like it might explain some things.

Teaching TSP:

“Ripple Effects of Incarceration,” by Kia Heise. In which UCLA’s Marie E. Berry shares a teaching exercise to work alongside Megan Comfort’s “Repercussions of Incarceration on Close Relationships.”

“Latino: Race or Ethnicity,” by Kia Heise. In which classrooms can discuss Wendy D. Roth’s “Creating a ‘Latino’ Race.”

A Few from the Community Pages:

A few? In two weeks, the Community Pages cover a constellation of topics through seemingly endless telescopes. The best I can do is offer up a few choice pieces, but by all means, get lost in the brilliance!

• SocImages. First, seriously, SocImages needs an awesome logo! Help! Next, time to give up on your evening, because there’s a lot of provocative, insightful, and hilarious content to wade into. SVU drawing on actual victims, pretending they’re fictional. Michael Kimmel on the egalitarianism and friendship and what it can do to stop rape. Ice Cream trucks: creepier than you thought, even that one that’s at all the music festivals. Burmese punks. Per capita American energy use levels off, but there are more capitae to worry about.
• Cyborgology. “7 Myths of the Digital Divide.” “Rudeness as Resistance.” “Hashtag Sympathy.” And the super important, “The Place of Blogs in Academic Writing.”
• Public Criminology. “Welcome to the panel! We’ve got fun and games!” Chris Uggen and Vesla Weaver on 4/30 at the U of MN on the West Bank. Be there, be square.
• The Color Line. Returns! “The Homogenization of Asian ‘Beauty.’” Eeeeerily similar, and I’m faceblind. They’re all pretty? Ish? Confounding and worrisome and mesmerizing.

Scholars Strategy Network:

“When Election Rules Undermine Democracy,” by Amel Ahmed. “We can’t just get rid of the electoral process, but we can educate each other on the rules of how it functions.”

“The Role of Empathy in Crime, Policing, and Justice,” by Chad Posick. “Unlike the death penalty, restorative justice measures may prevent future crimes while letting the victims and offenders heal.”

“How America’s Tradition of Localism Could Help Gun Control,” by Joseph Blocher. “Under American traditions of local rule, if people in Montana want to shoot elk with rifles, that should not prevent people in Manhattan from trying to keep residents from shooting each other with handguns.”

“The Widening Partisan Gender Gap in the U.S. Congress,” by Karen Beckwith. “When 1992 was dubbed the ‘Year of the Woman,’ the female Congressional presence doubled. But even if that suddenly happened again, women would still constitute only 35% of the House. American voters would still need to elect 64 more women to the House to achieve gender parity.”

*I mean, you could still write stuff for The Society Pages, where we totally give it away. Just a thought. Another thought? German Death Reggae. Ever since they mentioned it on “Parks and Recreation,” I’ve needed to hear it.

Look, we don’t have giant Scrooge McDuck piles of money. Or any piles of money. In fact, our bloggers do their work entirely for free, Doug and Chris donate their time as editors, our grad students write and edit and provide great insight because this is the stuff that interests them. We love what we do. But we’re not great with graphic design, and so we’re reaching out.

If you’ve got just the barest, scrawled-on-a-napkin idea for a new logo for SocImages, we want to see it. Our five favorite sketches will get $50 apiece for going to the trouble of getting creative on our behalf. If our favorite one is submitted by someone with the design skills and know-how to turn in into a real working logo, then we’ll pay a full $500!

Parameters: This should be a sketch. We value designers’ and artists’ work and time, and we’re clearly asking for some affection here, too, but we don’t want you creating a fully-realized, finished logo at this point, just a mock up of one. The logo should be for the web, and should be adaptable to smaller format avatars, but follow the current size and shape of the Soc Images banner.

Inspirations/Dislikes: We like text. We don’t like eyeballs or magnifying glasses. We have two different taglines, either of which could be incorporated: “Seeing is believing” and “Inspiring Sociological Imaginations Everywhere.” Black, red, and white are good standards and we like them, but we’re open to color. In fact, here are some logos Gwen and Lisa have identified as personal favorites (note that what they like about the logo for Go Fug Yourself is that it’s simple, clean, and represents the content of the blog well)—click to expand each thumbnail:

Now, if you’ve gotten inspired (some in our office certainly have), please submit a pdf or jpeg of your idea to socimageslogos@gmail.com. Be sure to include your name and email in a corner of the image.  Submissions are due May 1st—not long, but that’ll keep you from trying to make a finished product!

All the best from the TSP team.