sketches

When scholars think about doing interviews with the media, we often imagine ourselves to be doing some kind of great public service–wherein we deign to come down from the ivory tower and share our wisdom and knowledge with naive, uninformed journalists and their massive, mostly ignorant, and fundamentally distracted masses. There is some truth to this conceit. Writers and producers often approach a story or a topic with a limited, fairly narrow frame of reference, and sometimes don’t even know the most basic facts or more general trends that are involved.  I average maybe an interview a week, and find myself spending much of my time in these exchanges trying to get the writer or producer on the other end of the line to expand their scope, attend to some of the broader social forces or issues, or reframe their pieces in one way or the other. Sometimes this effort to frame and/or reorient stories works, sometimes it doesn’t (and rarely do we get credit either way).

But none of that is really the point of this post. The point of this post is that journalists often know a lot more than we give them credit for, and that we scholars–especially us sociologists–have got a lot more to gain from working with them than we usually realize. more...

New years bring new goals and often bigger ambitions. One of our TSP goals, over the next year or two, is to better represent the field of sociology as a whole. Don’t get us wrong: we think we’ve got a great site with tremendous (and tremendously provocative) content. But there are some areas of specialization we don’t cover as well as others, and our suite of blogs probably leans more toward the op-ed, commentary-and-critique side than the more basic, empirical data and explanation of concrete social processes that dominates much of our journal research and scholarly publishing.

We are working with our graduate student board on some new features and initiatives to make our site even bigger and broader, and we’re hoping to begin rolling some of those out in the weeks to come. But in thinking through and working on all of this, Chris and I have also begun to believe that we’ve got some ideas about sociology itself—what it is, how it can be better understood and practiced, and what its role in society should and can be—that aren’t nearly as well represented or articulated as they should be. So what we are going to do is start laying out some of those observations and ideas as part of the Editors’ Desk. We’re not sure exactly how much we’ve got to say or how it will cohere, but for the next few weeks, under the heading of “Sketches,” that’s what we’re going to try to do. Here goes…

Sketch 1: Just Don’t Call It That more...