*updates

HAPPY October! Here are some highlights from last month…

New Contributor:

We’re pleased to announce that Wendy Christensen, visiting Assistant Professor at Bowdoin College, has joined us as a regular contributor. She studies the families of men and women in the armed forces, especially the ways that the military “recruits” family members into support roles.  Her first post on war-themed advertisingwas picked up by BoingBoing! Keep your eye out for posts or follow her on twitter.

News, Publications, and Appearances:

Thanks to Rebecca Pardo and the team at Impact,  I had the super fun experience of talking about hook up culture on MTV Canada last week.  That’s a first for me!

I also got to play a part in a CNN story about the difference between nerds and hipsters. Great idea for a story and well written by Aaron Sagers.

Contributor Caroline Heldman continues to report on the cheerleader who was forced to cheer for the man who she alleges sexually assaulted her.  After losing a court case against the school, she was required to pay the school’s $35,000 in legal fees.  An outcry led to an overturning of that requirement.  More at Ms. magazine.

I’m looking forward to visiting Pacific Lutheran University this month (October 25-26). I’ll be talking about both hook up culture and my research about U.S. discourses on “female genital mutilation.” I’d love to see you there!

I’ve also just scheduled talks at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst and Harvard in March.  More on those later!

We were also linked from Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, Feministing, The Frisky, and BoingBoing (as mentioned above).  We bask in the attention.

Progress on Course Guides:

Mary Nell Trautner — University at Buffalo, SUNY — has developed a fantastic new Course Guide for instructors teaching Sociology of Gender. We hope you think it’s as awesome as we do!

Gwen is also hard at work on her Introduction to Sociology Course Guide and I’m working on a Research Methods guide that’ll be ready soon.

We’d like to collect as many Course Guides as we can, even different takes on the same course.  So, if you’re interested in writing on, please see our Instructors Page. There’s other good stuff for instructors there too.

Best of September:

Our fabulous intern, Norma Morella, collected the stuff ya’ll liked best from last month.  Here’s what she found:

• Christie Barcelos, Exclusion and American Yoga
• Margo DeMello, Capitalism, Animals, and the Ownership of Icons (with Toucan Sam!)
• Dave Paul Strohecker and David Banks, QR Codes and Digital Exclusivity
• Martin Hart-Landsberg, The Innovation Trap: How the iPhone Isn’t Saving America
• Wendy Christensen, United We Buy: Using Patriotism and War to Sell Products
• Gwen Sharp, How to Avoid Harassing Asian Women
• Gwen Sharp, Openly Breastfeeding on Sesame Street
• Lisa Wade, Exposing the Artificiality of Women in Fashion
• Lisa Wade, Race-Themed Events at Colleges (trigger warning)

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter and Facebook.  Gwen and I and most of the team are also on twitter:

• @lisadwade
• @gwensharpnv
• @familyunequal
• @carolineheldman
• @jaylivingston
• @wendyphd

HAPPY AUGUST!

New Contributor:

First and foremost, Sociological Images is pleased to welcome Marty Hart-Landsberg to our team of Contributors!  Marty is a professor of Economics at Lewis and Clark College. He’s been blogging, excellently, at Reports from the Economic Front, and he brings much needed expertise and insight into economic issues. We’re so pleased that he’s joined us!

New Publications and Appearances:

Catch contributor Caroline Heldman talking about the debt ceiling debate on Fox Business Channel’s Follow the Money tonight at 10 p.m. EST.  Heldman appeared on The Factor, Neil Cavuto’s Show, The Hannity Show, Freedomwatch, Bulls & Bears, and Follow the Money 14 times last month.

I’m very excited to have a new publication out in the journal Ethnography. My first using ethnographic methods, the paper is an analysis of lindy hop (a social dance from the 1930s and ’40s) with which I argue that the habitus has liberating as well as conservative potential: The Emancipatory Promise of the Habitus: Lindy Hop, the Body, and Social Change. And there’re pictures!

I also wrote about 500 words on hook up culture on college campuses for the Canadian website, The Mark.  I argue that hook up culture isn’t bad, it’s just-as-bad and no worse than the rest of society.

Gwen and I will both be guest blogging at Scientopia for the next two weeks.  You can catch all the same material here, but check out Scientopia if you’re interested in

Finally, SocImages showed up on TIME and BoingBoing this week. Always a good time…

New Pages:

We’ve added an “Editors’ Pick” tab to our menu. Gwen and I will be slowly culling our favorite posts from the last four years and adding them.  We’re excited to be able to highlight our best and most well-received stuff.

We’ve also added a “For Instructors” tab.  We’ve got some stuff for you there already, but are also asking for volunteers to help make the site more useful to instructors. We’re especially excited about the possibility of putting together Course Guides that collect the best posts for common sociology courses. Check it out!

Party in Las Vegas:

The American Sociological Association is having its annual conference in Las Vegas this year.  We invite all of you to the Blogger Party at 4:30pm on Sunday, August 21st at the Seahorse Lounge at Caesar’s Palace. Come by and say “hello”!

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

This is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter and Facebook.  Learn more about your editors at my website and Gwen’s.  And a bunch of us are on twitter @lisadwade, @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, @carolineheldman, and @jaylivingston.

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!?

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!