• Benika Dixon (Assistant Professor of Public Health at Texas A&M University), J. Carlee Purdum (Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Houston) and Tara Goddard (Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning at Texas A&M University) wrote an article for The Conversation on how jails and prisons fail to protect incarcerated people during natural disasters. “People who are incarcerated can’t take protective actions, such as evacuating or securing their belongings,” they describe. “They have no say in decisions that the system makes for them.” Carceral facilities are often not evacuated due to facility designs that make it difficult for people to exit quickly or a lack of available sheltering locations. Natural disasters can also exacerbate physical and mental health problems for incarcerated individuals.
  • An article in the New York Times arts section discussed various depictions of pregnant women in arts and advertising. The story quoted Kathryn Jezer-Morton (Sociologist and Columnist for The Cut) on how celebrities and influencers pose for photos while pregnant. Jezer-Morton credits Demi Moore’s famous 1991 Vanity Fair cover photo with popularizing “bump hands,” a pose in which women place their hands around their stomach, “creating a meaningful enclosure around appropriate fatness” and emphasizing the bump “to reassure the viewer that underneath this one protrusion is a thin person.”
  • In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Tressie McMillan Cottom (Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science) prompts readers to “look to the tradwives, podcast bros and wellness influencers” to understand how president-elect Donald Trump’s ability to tap into the aesthetics of online spaces may have helped him win the election. McMillan Cottom describes that online groups don’t map cleanly to traditional political poles and are racially and ethnically diverse. “Trump did not win over [ ] minority and young voters because he figured out how to appeal to their identity,” McMillan Cottom argues. Rather, “he excelled at tapping into the information ecosystems — social media, memes and the cultish language of overlapping digital communities — where minority and young voters express their identity. That is a meaningful difference.”
  • This week, Brazil celebrated Black Consciousness Day, a new national holiday honoring Black struggles for freedom in Brazil. Edward Telles (Professor of Sociology at the University of California Irvine) commented that although Brazil has the largest population of people of African descent of any country outside the continent of Africa, Brazil’s Black population has been “invisibilized until recently.” Telles explains that leaders in Brazilian media, government, and businesses were almost entirely White, but “that is slowly beginning to change.” This story was covered by The Washington Post.