Sociological Images

HAPPY JULY!

If you’ve been paying close attention, you’ll have noticed three new members of the Sociological Images team.  We’re so pleased to announce that Philip N. Cohen, Caroline Heldman, and Jay Livingston have joined on as regular Contributors.  Each has a bustling public intellectual presence of their own and we’re thrilled that they’re blogging for SocImages!

Philip N. Cohen, PhD is a Sociology professor at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  He writes about family, work, and inequality professionally, and at his fabulous blog, Family Inequality.

Jay Livingston, PhD is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University.  His expertise is in social psychology, culture, and crime.  He blogs at the equally fabulous Montclair SocioBlog, where he also does great work teaching science literacy with his posts about statistics.

Caroline Heldman, PhD teaches Politics at Occidental College.  She is an expert on the presidency and gender in politics, featured in the new documentary Miss Representation.  She’s also an intrepid investigative journalist and represents the liberal point of view on Fox programs weekly.

Please welcome them with your always incisive commentary!

AROUND THE INTERNET:

After Gwen posted my talk on hook up culture here at SocImages, it was picked up by BoingBoing (to my excitement!).  After seeing the talk, Ben Privot at The Consensual Project asked me to do a quick interview on deconstructing cultural narratives about sexuality.

Caroline, our new Contributor, published two essays exposing the culturally and politically corrupt response to a rape in Silsbee Texas.  You can read abridged versions at the Ms. blog (here and here) or her unedited version at her blog.

Gwen was all over the internet this month: on About for a story about Arnold Schwartzenegger’s Love Child Scandal, on the Huffington Post about a racially-charged Dove Ad, and on a local Las Vegas NPR station offering some perspective on home buying and the recession.

Finally, I was also tickled to see my post about the “obscene” Dossier cover featuring a feminine male model used in a Newsy video report about the controversy.

WHERE ELSE WE ARE…

This is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter and Facebook.  You can learn more about your editors at my website and Gwen’s.

Oh and, um, I totally joined twitter this week!  And you can follow Philip Cohen and Caroline Heldman too.  :)

Sorry for the late post today! We’re both busy with travel plans. Lisa is on her way to New Orleans as I type. I will be in Oklahoma from June 2-8 and won’t be able to check comments or update posts while I’m there, so be patient with slower than usual responses from me.

NEWS:

We have a new Sociological Images essay, “Secrets of a Feminist Icon,” now available in the Spring 2011 issue of Contexts magazine. The essay, based on a post on the same topic, discusses the famous “You Can Do It!” poster associated with Rosie the Riveter, including several myths about its creation and use. You can download the essay here.

We’re always excited when we get linked to BoingBoing. This month they reposted a video we posted by Jay Smooth about media, agenda setting, and the Donald Trump “presidential candidacy” fiasco/joke.

Gwen was quoted in a Globe and Mail story about a used car dealership that compared sexually experienced people to used cars. She was also quoted in a Huffington Post article about racial representation and a recent Dove ad.

If you’re interested in writing a post for Soc Images, check out our Guest Post guidelines.

This is your monthly reminder that we’re on Twitter and Facebook.

Finally, if you’d like to learn more about us, you can visit our personal websites here (Lisa) and here (Gwen).

NEWS:

Gwen and I are finishing up our semesters and looking back at a wonderful year with all of you!

Some highlights:

We were granted an innovation in teaching award from the Pacific Sociological Association and have been nominated for awards from the American Sociological Association and the Pop Culture / American Culture Association.  Plus David Mayeda was kind enough to review us for Teaching Sociology.

We started accepting proposals for guest posts.

We broke the 10,000 friend barrier on Facebook.  (And we think over 3,500 on Twitter is nothing to shake a stick at.)

We just barely almost didn’t quite reach 750,000 visits in one month.  But darn were we close!

We entered a partial syndication agreement with the historic Ms. magazine.

We broke a story that ended with Abercrombie Kids pulling their push-up bikini top for kids.  Read the original post and our summary.

We managed to fool a few of you on April Fool’s Day (scroll to bottom).

And we let you all in on the mystery that is Dmitriy T.M.

Sociologists, Gwen and I will be at ASA, SWS, and SSSP this August. So please say “hello” if you see us or look us up in the programs. We’ll be giving a talk or two.

KUDOS:

Special thanks to Jon Smadja, Velanie Williams, Norma Morella for all their hard work on the blog.  We couldn’t do it without you.

And thanks for reading everyone!  We’re looking forward to a productive summer and another record-breaking year!

NEWS:

We have lots of fun stuff to report this month!

First, please join us in thanking Jon Smajda for re-designing our website!  In addition to the aesthetic changes (always keeping us looking fresh, he is), he’s given us power over TABS.  We have lots of plans for these tabs, so keep an eye out and please be patient with our experimenting.

Second, SocImages sparked the outcry that led to Abercrombie Kids removing a product from their website.  Reader Allison K. sent in the tip, we put up a short post about the push-up bikini tops and the sexualization of young girls (Abercrombie Kids is for ages 7-14), the story went viral, and Abercrombie eventually folded.  All in all, a fun week. Plus I had the distinct pleasure of being quoted using the phrase “perverted uncle.”

Alongside the Abercrombie story, Gwen and I were interviewed by Tom Megginson for Change Marketing, my discussion of the blog Born This Way was picked up by ABC News, and we received a generous review at Shinpai Deshou.

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that we’re on Twitter and Facebook.

Oh, and we’d be remiss if we didn’t tell you that Sociological Images has been purchased by AOL!  The editors of The Society Pages have agreed to turn over editorial control to the mega-corporation in exchange for a principle-collapsing $315 million dollars.  Gwen and I must admit that we’re a bit confused by the whole thing.  Somehow we thought our 3,419 free posts were for something bigger than Chris and Doug’s pocketbook.  But, looking back, we have to admit that we were, um, tragically and enormously naive.  Hind-sight is 20/20 I guess; c’est la vie.

NEWS:

The newest Sociological Images essay to be published in Contexts magazine, The Social Control of Mothers, is now available.  The essay, drawing heavily on Elizabeth Armstrong’s book Conceiving Risk, Bearing Responsibility, explores the imperfect relationship between pregnant women’s consumption of alcohol and fetal alcohol spectrum disorders and asks whether controlling women’s behavior is really the best way to reduce the rate of these disorders. You can check out our earlier post on the topic, download the (more carefully composed) essay from Contexts, or send us a note at socimages@thesocietypages.org to ask for a copy.

Don’t forget that Sociological Images welcomes guest posts from academics and graduate students.  Please read our Guest Post Guidelines for more.

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that we’re on Twitter and Facebook.  If we’re lucky, we may just reach 10,000 friends sometime this March.  Who will be the 10,000th!?

Gwen and I are eager to feature a wider variety of voices on Sociological Images.  To that end, we would like invite scholars, instructors, and graduate students in sociology or related fields to consider working with us to write Guest Posts.  We’re happy to feature your own work if there is an image (graphs and figures are great, as are other illustrations from pop culture or elsewhere) or, if you see a sociologically interesting bit of data, advertisement, photograph, or some other visual, we’d love it if you’d consider writing something for Sociological Images.

See our Guidelines for Submission here.

NEWS:

Please welcome our new Intern!  Norma Morella is currently in her third year at Occidental College studying biology and Spanish.  She plans to pursue a Masters in Speech Language Pathology, possibly specializing in bilingualism. Though being involved with Sociological Images is one of her first experiences in sociology, she is highly intrigued by the multitude of academic and social questions that the diverse field provokes, and she looks forward to her continued interest in the subject.

We’re honored to have been nominated for the 2010 Pop Culture/American Culture Association Award for Best Electronic Reference Cite.  Thanks to Pete La Chapelle for thinking of us and putting in the work to make the nomination happen!

Sociological Images was listed in Regator’s Top 50 Blogs of 2010!  Regator is a blog aggregator, looking for all the best blog material on the web, so we’re thrilled to be noticed!  Thanks so much to cofounder, Kimberly Turner.

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that we’re on Twitter and Facebook.

Happy February!