SSN

New & Noteworthy

• Shania Kuo summarizes the landscape of social science research on Islamophobia in the United States in the latest installment of our series, “There’s Research on That.” {4 min read}
• Check out our Media Report by Mallory Harrington for recent news featuring social scientists. This week, Alexandrea J. Ravenelle on the new major movie inspired by her research on the gig economy; Canton Winer on “gender detachment”; Orlando Patterson on the dimensions of freedom; and Tony Silva and Emily Huddart on Canada’s embrace of the paranormal. {3 min read}

From the Archives

• The New York City mayoral race ended this week with the election of Zohran Mamdani. In his campaign Mamdani positioned himself against economic elites and “corporate greed” and pledged to make New York City more affordable for residents. This 2012 article from our partners at the Scholars Strategy Network discusses why the interests of the wealthy are often overrepresented in American politics. {5 min read}
• Condé Nast folded Teen Vogue into Vogue.com and laid off much of the staff. According to a union statement, many of those laid off are BIPOC women or trans politics reporters, including the politics editor. The Roosevelt Institute, a think tank which had applauded Teen Vogue for its political coverage, called the merger “evidence that corporate concentration eliminates innovative ideas and silences voices with less power.” This 2016 piece from Sociological Images considers how media mergers threaten racial representation. {2 min read}

More from our Partners & Community Pages

Contexts

• In his new piece for Contexts, Andrew McNeely reflects on his upbringing in a gun-loving Texas family, arguing for a sociological focus on how gun culture affects both its members and the wider public. {7 min read}

Engaging Sports

• In Beyond Myths, Jack Hardwicke and Christopher R. Matthews complicate the widely held belief that sport is good for public health. {7 min read}

Council on Contemporary Families

• In The Lonely, Fractured Lives of Estranged Grandparents, practicing psychologist Joshua Coleman explains his concern over decreasing rates of grandparent/grandchild closeness. This piece was originally published in 2024 in Psychology Today. {5 min read}

First Publics

• In A Clingy Friend, Tamanna M. Shah considers what it means to teach sociology in a moment when AI is both an object of study and a tool shaping pedagogy. {5 min read}

Oh, have you heard of this Scholars Strategy Network? Of course you have! You’re hip, in-the-know sorts. But the reason I’m pointing it out specifically right now is that I want to direct your eyes to two specific things going on over at their site:

1. As Syria takes the spotlight off Miley (for real), I recommend you return to Richard Lachmann and Hal Brands’s thoughts on America’s foreign policy and its place in the world. SSN’er Jeff Faux also talks war-weariness in the Huffington Post.
2. September’s topical spotlight on SSN is labor and unionization. While we’ll be featuring several of the briefs in this suite (I believe 17 make up the full complement) on the SSN section of TSP (fun with acronyms!), it’s particularly worth reading Nick Carnes and Jake Rosenfeld’s summary of the spotlight pieces.

Now, back to TSP, riiiiiight after I wish my mom a happy birthday. Happy Birthday, Mom! more...

Over the course of the past year, Theda Skocpol, Harvard social scientist and a great friend of TSP, has been working to create a network of publicly minded social scientists to help bring scholarly research and expertise to bear on issues of public importance and political significance. She calls it the Scholars Strategy Network, or SSN for short. Given our commitment to public engagement and with a regional branch here in the Twin Cities, we’ve been following this initiative closely and indeed trying to contribute in our own small ways. Not even a year old, the SSN now boasts over 100 members and has eight regional chapters. And perhaps most notable of all (at least from our web-centric view), this week marks the launch of the Network’s new website: http://www.scholarsstrategynetwork.org.

Over the next few days, Skocpol and other members of the network will be in Washington, introducing the site and a few of the research briefs that are its most useful and impressive feature to representatives of the 100 or so organizations that attend the weekly Common Purpose meetings. They also plan to make an appearance at Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro’s supper seminar for House members and staffers, and present to the White House Outreach Office.  “So,” as Skocpol puts it, “the word will be getting around fast.  People will be looking at our site, downloading our briefs, and getting a sense of who and what we have to offer.”

We invite you to take a quick sneak peak for yourselves. You’ll see that more than a few friends of and contributors to TSP are involved, including Minnesota’s own Larry Jacobs, one of the four featured scholars for the inaugural month of June. You should also be able to scroll through SSN’s brand new collection of original research briefs. These short, accessibly written briefs summarize key research findings, present basic facts on timely topics, and spell out policy options on issues of immediate public and political concern. Written by a stellar cast of leading scholars, these are really great and useful pieces. There are almost 90 available on topics ranging from jobs creation and economic growth to health and education reform, to immigration policy, elections, and the environment.

To help promote and disseminate this work, our plan here at TSP is to use our “Reading List” feature to highlight some of the best and most relevant of these briefs over the summer months. We hope you find these pieces as interesting, informative, and accessible as we do. You can also check the Network out on Twitter: @SSNScholars.