teaching

The American Sociological Association has some great sociological resources on their website related to COVID-19. While they are primarily meant to support sociologists during this time, we think many of the resources will appeal to TSP’s broad audience. For example, ASA has curated a list of journal articles (open-access for the time being – no paywall!) related to COVID-19, like this article on how job insecurity relates to mental health. For instructors, ASA’s teaching resources platform, TRAILS, is currently open-access. Read more about the resources ASA is offering below.

Open Access ASA Journal Articles Relevant to COVID-19  

ASA has worked with our journal editors to create a curated collection of existing articles from ASA journals that could be useful when trying to respond to, cope with, and teach about the enormous disruptions this pandemic has produced.  A few examples of what you will find in the collection:

  • A graphic visualization of the cumulative effects of natural hazards on racial wealth gaps between 1999-2013 which sheds light on disparities in economic impact this pandemic may have.  
  • A socio-organizational approach to explaining empirical variation in rates of altruism. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, social distancing might be conceptualized as an altruistic act that can be more or less effectively structured and developed by the organizational and institutional environment. 
  • The now classic article “Social Conditions as Fundamental Causes of Disease,” which has been cited nearly 5,000 times since it was first published in 1995.

Click here to freely access the full collection of articles.

Crowd Sourced: Sociologists in the News on COVID-19

Journalists are turning to sociologists to help them explain the social dimensions of the current crisis. We have created an open-access spread sheet devoted to collecting and sharing information about these media mentions and media appearances. Please help spread the word about sociologists in the news by adding information about your own media appearances and those you have seen.

Crowd Sourced: COVID-19 Projects Initiated by Sociologists

Sociologists are responding in creative ways to learn more about the pandemic and its consequences. They are collecting data, creating interdisciplinary research collaborations, and supporting their communities. We have launched an open-access spread sheet devoted to collecting and sharing information about these projects. You’ll see that some initiatives are already listed. We’re hoping you will add initiatives of which you are aware, and together we can disseminate information about these projects.  

TRAILS Remains Temporarily Open Access 

In response to COVID-19, ASA has temporarily made TRAILS, its peer-reviewed library of teaching and learning materials for sociology, available to everyone. Anyone may log in to TRAILS using their ASA username and password, regardless of their membership status. If someone does not have an ASA username and password, they can create one here. Please share this information with your colleagues.  

ASA Webinars – All Welcome

Sociology Student Town Hall: Navigating COVID-19. April 16, 2020. 3:00 p.m. Eastern. The Student Forum Advisory Board invites sociology graduate and undergraduate students to a town hall to discuss how to navigate the challenges of being a student during this difficult time. Whether you are taking courses or are in the final stages of writing your dissertation, the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted students in unique ways. We invite students at all stages to join us for a conversation to share resources, discuss coping strategies, and commiserate. Click here to register

Best Practices and Strategies for Successful Online Teaching. April 22, 2020. 3:00 p.m. Eastern.  Because of COVID-19, faculty have quickly moved their courses online, and their immediate focus is getting through the crisis. As institutions look beyond the current semester, a growing number are moving summer courses online and some are planning for this possibility for fall. In this previously scheduled webinar, Melinda Messineo will cover best practices for online teaching and learning, as well as sociology-specific recommendations to help faculty prepare for and improve their online teaching. Dr. Messineo is a professor of sociology at Ball State University. She was a member of theASA Task Force on Liberal Learning and the Sociology Major, where she was part of the subcommittee on online learning. Click here to register.

Expanded: ASA Webpage with COVID-19 Resources for Sociologists

ASA has expanded its webpage devoted to collecting and sharing resources useful to sociologists during the current crisis. New additions to the page include a recorded webinar, “College Students and Mental Health: Strategies for Supporting Students,” resources for students, and resources to support teaching and advising, including new links to online sociological content for courses. Among those, don’t miss the brand new video in the Sociological Insights series, “An Embrace of Christian Nationalism,” featuring research by Andrew Whitehead.

What are you losing sleep over? Sociologist Syed Ali reviews a new book that engages the question for middle-aged American women.

Ada Calhoun, Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis, Grove Press, 2020.

Generation X women can’t sleep—a third of them get less than
seven hours a night. They sleep less than other adult age groups, and, compared
to Generation X men, they have a harder time falling asleep and staying asleep.
Why?

The answer to this question is at the core of Ada Calhoun’s brilliant new book, Why We Can’t Sleep, the story of about today’s middle-class American women and their midlife crises.

Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis looks specifically looking at the women of Generation X, born between 1965-1980, who are caught in between and are distinct from Boomers and Millennials. (Calhoun understands that many people, like my former Contexts Magazine co-editor Philip N. Cohen, think the idea of a generational experience is nonsense. She’s using it anyway.) These women have come of adult age as college tuition increased (so they have more debt, and more agita about debt, than their parents), wages have stagnated (daughters born in the 1980s have a 25% chance of out-earning their fathers—and no, that’s not a typo), and age of first marriage and first child have increased so these women are taking care of children and aging parents at the same time. For these women, who are the beneficiaries of the feminist struggles of the 1960s, “the belief that girls could do anything morphed into a directive that they must do everything.” To say these middle-class women of varied ethnic/racial and regional backgrounds have a lot of pressure on them is, well, an understatement.

Calhoun is one of these women. Born in 1976, she writes
that, “[s]ince turning forty a couple of years ago, I’ve been obsessed with
women my age and their—our—struggles with money, relationships, work, and existential
despair.” She started off by calling a reporter friend and asked, “Do you know
anyone having a midlife crisis I could talk to?” The friend, after thinking
about it, said, “I’m trying to think of any woman I know who’s not.”

Sleep, or the lack of it, is just the tip of the iceberg, an entry point to this book’s thoroughly sociological analysis of women’s midlife crises. Calhoun knows that what matters is Contexts (my favorite word and magazine), and indeed that is the story she is most interested in telling. “The context for Generation X women is this: we were an experiment in crafting a higher-achieving, more fulfilled, more well-rounded version of the American woman. In midlife many of us find that the experiment is largely a failure. We thought we could have both thriving careers and rich home lives and make more and achieve more than our parents, but most of us have gained little if any advantage.” The book is a deep dive into the divergence between aspirations and reality, the structural factors that keep women from having it all, and the psychological toll this takes. Individually, a woman’s midlife crisis can be seen as her issue; but we know it goes well beyond her.

What are these factors that go well beyond the individual? Again, shifts in the economy and in terms of women’s rights have led far more women to enter the workforce. On the one hand, this means economic power. On the other hand, it means economic responsibility. As the age of marriage and childbirth has gone up, they’re taking care of children at the same time as they’re often taking care of their parents and their in-laws. Even if women are childless, they’re still stressing about work and parents and partners and money and retirement and health insurance and and and. The debt levels that people of this generation face are higher than for older folk at the same age, cost of living (especially childcare and rent/mortgages) is higher and wages are stagnant in the middle so paying off debt is harder, and they save less. They get laid off. They’re forced to freelance/work part-time/be unemployed. With so much on their plates and so much financial insecurity, even for the richer among them, it’s not surprising that some of the many balls these women are juggling will fall. A response Calhoun heard from some women about careers and kids and husbands not panning out as hoped was: “What did *I* do wrong?” (Emphasis added.) They blame themselves instead of others or their structural circumstances; they swallow their despair, quietly. This is not something men do.

*********

That said, a lot has gone right for these women of a certain
age. The wage gap has shrunk some. There are more professional opportunities.
Title IX has expanded educational and sports opportunities in K-12 and higher
ed. Men do more work at home. There’s some pushback against sexism. “The
complaints of well-educated middle- and upper-middle-class women are easy to
disparage—as a temporary setback, a fixable hormonal imbalance, or
#FirstWorldProblems.”

So, there’s lots of reasons why Generation X women shouldn’t
feel bad. And here’s the central question of the book that Calhoun poses: “So
why do we?”

What to do when you’re a middle-aged woman who’s feeling bad, feeling depressed, feeling physically discombobulated, and you can’t sleep? There’s no shortage of people giving advice—doctors, other women, men (so many men), the fashion mags, the morning shows, Gwyneth Paltrow. Take anti-depressants. Supplements. Pollens and oils. CBD. Put jade eggs in your vagina. Long walks in nature, take the stairs, drink lots of water, limit caffeine and alcohol, do your planks.

And yet still they feel bad. And still they can’t sleep. But
no one hears them. Calhoun points out the stereotypical male midlife crisis
involves busting stuff up—marriages, careers, etc. But women’s are usually
quieter. Sometimes, yeah, there’s an affair, “but more often she sneaks her
suffering in around the edges of caretaking and work. From the outside, no one
may notice anything amiss.” One of the women she interviewed bought herself
that well-known marker of the male midlife crisis—a car. But not a fancy, new
sports car. She turned in her minivan for a Prius. A ten-year-old one at that.

Calhoun’s triumph is to put the personal in a sociological
perspective, in a very convincing way. You don’t have to take it from me, a
cisgender, hetero middle-aged male. My wife, Eli Pollard, who’s turning 50 this
year (note to self: start party planning now), confiscated the book from me
when I bought it two weeks ago. She devoured it and, like so many other women
have commented in public forums, said she felt like this book was written just
for her. Kristi Williams, badass sociologist and demographer (and editor of the
Journal of Marriage and Family) told me this when I asked her what she
especially liked about Calhoun’s work: “That my crippling insomnia might be
related to the intersection of age, period, and cohort rang true in a geeky
demographer kind of way.” I said, “Dude—please let me quote that!” To which she
said, “Fuck yeah! Add menopausal hormone chaos to that demographic cocktail as
well.”

And speaking of menopause, I like that Calhoun puts hormonal
changes due to perimenopause and menopause as factors in the midlife crisis and
sleep deprivation near the end of the book. She starts with the sociological,
then goes to the physiological, and shows the interplay. She put it this way in
an adapted excerpt in Time Magazine: “The unique confluence of stressors and
hormonal shifts poses a sort of chicken-or-egg problem for Gen X women: the
symptoms of hormonal fluctuation (like sleeplessness) are exacerbated by
stress, while those symptoms (like not sleeping) in turn raise stress levels.”

Her penultimate chapter is on something all too familiar—the
crippling effects of too much social media. But instead of going on about this
(something she could have easily and successfully done), she pivots to
something much more useful conceptually: the benefits of a networked life. She
gives plenty of examples from others and herself, and solid advice. “[T]he
second you start having perimenopausal symptoms: start a club. A book club
gives you a reason to read and to get together with friends. A stitch and
bitch. A going-out-dancing club. Margarita Mondays. A
try-every-pizza-place-in-town club. [SA: This only applies to New Yorkers.] A
New Midlife Crisis Initiation Club,™ perhaps!”

Her concrete advice in this chapter, and throughout the
book, really, is a welcome, sociologically informed, corrective to the multiple
streams of well-meaning though often ineffective and sometimes just bad advice
women get from doctors, the fashion mags, the morning shows, Gwyneth Paltrow.
Some things people suggest to middle-aged women who are feeling bad, feeling
depressed, feeling physically discombobulated, and can’t sleep: Take
anti-depressants. Supplements. Pollens and oils. CBD. Put jade eggs in your
vagina. (Don’t put jade eggs in your vagina.) Take long walks in nature, take
the stairs, drink lots of water, limit your caffeine and alcohol intake, do
your planks.

They do these things, and yet still they feel bad. And still
they can’t sleep. But no one hears them. Calhoun points out the stereotypical
male midlife crisis involves busting stuff up—marriages, careers, etc. But
women’s are usually quieter. Sometimes, yeah, there’s an affair, “but more
often she sneaks her suffering in around the edges of caretaking and work. From
the outside, no one may notice anything amiss.” One of the women she
interviewed bought herself that well-known marker of the male midlife crisis—a
car. But not a fancy, new sports car. She turned in her minivan for a Prius. A
ten-year-old one at that.

*********

I should have said this earlier, but I’ll say it now—I’m friends with Calhoun, so of course I’m her cheerleader. But that’s ok, because this book really is great. (There are See the dozens of positive reviews online, if you don’t believe me.. And Pollard’s and Williams’s words above.) Who should read this book? Generation X women for sure. Anyone who has a Generation X woman in their lives—partners, parents, children, friends, coworkers—needs to read this to understand their situation. You want to know why this woman can’t sleep? Calhoun has answers. You want to know how you can help? There are implicit and explicit answers. Do more for this woman. Bosses, pay her more and give her better job opportunities. Partners, do half the cooking, cleaning, and childwork. Make your their teenage kids read this and tell them to be better to their mothers! (Ok, about that last one…)

Since most of you reading this review will probably be
sociologists/related geeks, anyone who teaches courses on aging, gender,
marriage and family should assign this bookuse this. Calhoun makes the point
that research on aging still often skips middle age, and it’s typically on men.
This book fills a gaping hole, and it’s an easy, fast, satisfying read. Your
students will actually read it and love it and tell you all about it and
understand all you were talkingthe nuanced points you were making about the
whole semester in class through their understanding of this book. Do it.

For the sociology geeks, I need to stress Calhoun’s writing
style is wonderful. It’s a little bit memoir and a lot sociology. There’s a lot
of data and analysis, and a lot of storytelling. Remember my geeks, she’s
written a book that she wants people to read and wants it to sell. So, you
know, she can make some money. Because she’s a freelancer paying the equivalent
of a mortgage every month for health insurance, hefty credit card debt, and
she’s never sure how long until the next gig. So the book has to be
interesting—the content of course, but especially how you present it. I’m
fascinated by her personal stories, but I’m also fascinated when she gives me
FOUR PAGES IN A ROW OF STATISTICS. Numbers don’t have to be boring. And she’s a
great interviewer—the stories of pain and occasional joy these women tell her
are the product of a sympathetic ear and asking the right question of the right
person at the right time. This book will be highly instructional for
qualitative interviewers, but also for all of us who strive to find a broader
reading audience.

There’s a lot here for sociologists to quibble over, and
even be annoyed by. And that’s ok. Calhoun’s stepping into your turf. If you
don’t like it, read this book even more carefully. Write better so that others
might read your book. You’re probably not going to get the readership she has.
But you might.

Calhoun ends on a hopeful note: “Just in the course of
writing this book, I saw the lives of many of the women I spoke with change,
mostly for the better. They found new jobs or new towns or new partners or
figured out how to better enjoy the ones they had. They got on hormones or got
off hormones or started exercising or stopped exercising. Time passed. Things
were different.”

So the midlife crisis is not a permanent state. The importance of this book is in bringing these women’s private stories into the public, telling women they’re not alone in this, there are factors beyond their control that are contributing to thistheir midlife crises and inability to sleep, that this is ok, it’s normal, and there are better ways to cope. This is a big idea book, and it delivers.

Syed Ali is a former co-editor of Contexts Magazine, an aspiring potter in Brooklyn, and the grievance officer for Local 3998, @LIU_FF. He is the co-author (with Margaret M. Chin) of The Peer Effect: Lessons from the Best High School in America for Improving Our Educational System, which is forthcoming (at some point) from NYU Press. He tweets @skyedali.

The 2018 ‘Teach with TSP’ Winning Submission. Click to view full post.

Here at The Society Pages we are committed to making sociology accessible and clear to everyone, and we’d like to honor the people who are taking TSP from the web to the classroom! To do this, we’re announcing the second annual “Teach with TSP” Contest. Tell us how you use TSP in your classes — whether as part of an assignment, lecture, or discussion activity —and we’ll publish our favorites and share them widely with our followers!

Any TSP content is fair game, from core to community pages, CCF to Cyborgology, TROT, Discoveries, Sociological Images, and more. Winners will have their work featured on the site and get some TSP swag!

To submit your nomination, send a short overview (no longer than one page) on how you use TSP materials in an assignment, classroom activity, or lecture to tsp@thesocietypages.org with the subject line “Teach with TSP Submission.” Feel free to attach pictures or sample materials as well! The deadline for submissions is Friday November 16, 2019.

Screenshot by See-ming Lee via Flickr CC. Click for original.
Screenshot by See-ming Lee via Flickr CC. Click for original.

“I’ve got a bone to pick with you!”

Such was the rather awkward beginning of a recent conversation I had with a friend in the social sciences—let’s call him “Norbert”—here at the University of Minnesota. Even more disconcerting, it turned out that Norbert (who is not a sociologist by training) was talking about my Editor’s Desk post from a week or so ago, the one trying to specify the distinctive elements of the sociological imagination. It’s not that I minded being challenged—I actually thrive on the thrust and parry of intellectual discussion and debate. It was more that I didn’t see it coming. Aside from a little kerfuffle about wholism and holism, the post had circulated fairly widely and had generated a number of complementary comments and supportive emails. more...

RU092013For the next couple of Roundups, I’d like to welcome TSP’s graduate editor Hollie Nyseth Brehm. She’ll be covering for me as I head off on a 3-hour cruise. Actually, there’s no cruise. But I do expect to find myself washed up on a beach for a stretch, so I won’t be rounding up the site until… October 11th? Craziness. For now, one last hurrah before heading for the airport (yet again). more...