“Sketchfactor,” “Nextdoor.com,” “GhettoTracker.com,” and “Operation GroupMe” are just a few of the digital services available to city dwellers hoping to monitor their neighborhood’s crime rates and connect business owners and community members to law enforcement with greater ease. But are they just a more efficient method of racial profiling and criminalization?

That’s the question that Leslie Hinkson, associate professor of sociology at Georgetown University, grapples with in a recent interview in a Washington Post article that investigates the effect of these surveillance applications in D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood:

The group has codified its own language and operating culture. African Americans are referred to as “aa.” Hundreds of images of unaware African Americans circulate in the group.

“We should be honest here,” Hinkson continued:

Crime does occur in Georgetown. And quite often when people describe the perpetrators of those crimes, they’re usually young men of color. But that doesn’t mean every person of color is an automatic suspect.

Read the article here.

Barbecue is to the American south what wine and cheese are to Europe. That is, a deeply ritualistic cultural practice that differs greatly by region and, more subtly, by micro-locality. Travel across the south and one will find different cuts of meat, cooking techniques, sauces, side dishes and beverages. Or so says John Shelton Reed, Sociology Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in Calvin Trillin’s recent article “In Defense of the True ‘Cue,” for The New Yorker. The article zeroes in on the “Campaign For Real Barbecue,” an effort to preserve traditional North Carolina barbecue and what Professor Reed believes to be it’s vital role in North Carolina social life.

In his darker moments, he sees his beloved barbecue joints being replaced by the soulless outposts of some franchise operation he calls the International House of Barbecue, which uses “barbecue” to mean meat with bottled barbecue sauce on it—your choice of meat, your choice of sauce. Just as the Campaign for Real Ale believes in “well run pubs as the centres of community life,” John Reed believes that the traditional barbecue joint is a place in the South where people from all walks of life and all races, from the sheriffs’ deputies to the construction workers to the town bankers, gather to eat the local specialty at a price just about anybody can afford. (A barbecue sandwich at Stamey’s goes for three dollars and twenty-five cents.) A passage in “Holy Smoke” [one of Reed’s books] says, “North Carolina barbecue is an edible embodiment of Tradition. For many of us, barbecue symbolizes Home and People.”

Read the full article here.

Black Friday is around the corner… as will be the long lines of people waiting for hot retail deals. This queuing up isn’t uncommon; we see people line up for grand openings, new gadgets, concert tickets, and even for free burritos and ice cream. Americans stand in line (often voluntarily) for approximately 37 billion hours a year. Why?

David Gibson, a sociologist at Notre Dame, draws our attention to the human desire to be part of a niche community,

these are people whose identities and stories about themselves are very much tied to being foodies, on being on the cutting edge of fashion and style, or being Apple device lovers. They get recognition, status, and buzz among their friends by showing up at these places and being the first person with a new iPhone.

Additionally, Gibson told CityLab that humans are more concerned with the length of the line than with how fast it is moving. To pass the time, he suggested that people should try to make friends with others; “If you’re actually queuing up for something which is coveted and exciting, then you’re kind of a member of a community to start with.” It would be easy to strike up a conversation because you already know what you have in common.

When it comes to cutting the line and saving spots, Gibson adds,

The important thing is that [others] see that you are tied to someone, and they’re willing to think that person was standing there on behalf of you. If there’s a limited number of devices or seats, and the people behind you think that an addition of a person is going to make a difference [in the wait time], that’s the only time that it will matter.

Women account for about 7% of the U.S. prison population. Compared to men, they are much more likely to experience poverty, mental health issues, and various forms of victimization prior to being incarcerated. And while they’re in prison, women are more likely to experience mental health problems, chronic medical conditions, and sexual misconduct by staff members. These issues do not disappear after release, but are coupled with difficulty finding adequate employment, public assistance, and health care.

Sociologist Susan Sered was recently featured in Sojourners, which explored her advice to faith communities helping formerly incarcerated women. Drawing on eight years of research with criminalized women in the Boston area, Sered suggests churches and communities of faith can provide shared knowledge and support in the form of information about housing, employment, health systems, and social networks. She believes faith communities can help women make meaning out of their suffering by reframing their incarceration as experience that can provide them with special insight, rather than a reason to blame or ostracize them. Sered says, “criminalized women need to hear these powerful messages from religious communities.”

Read the full article here.

Amid presidential candidate debates and national conversations surrounding gun violence and police brutality, issues and positions are often framed as conservative versus liberal (and those are equated with Republican and Democrat, respectively). While we recognize that both parties have moral values that guide their beliefs and support of certain political agendas, a debate must necessarily leave some room for a change of heart. But how can you change an opponent’s mind?

Sociologist Robb Willer, one of the authors of a paper published in Personality and Social Psychology, is quoted in Quartz: “Morality can be a source of political division, a barrier to building bi-partisan support. But it can also be a bridge if you can connect your position to your audience’s deeply held moral convictions.” Make sure your foe knows the morals behind your position, and they’ll be more likely to give it a careful listen. After all, the rationale for changing their mind—making the moral choice—is already clear.

Wikipedia is the largest source of free information on the Internet. According to the digital analytics website Alexa, it’s is the 6th most popular website in the United States and 7th in the entire world. What is troubling is that between 84 and 91% of its editors are male, and the site’s few female editors face regular harassment and marginalization. This imbalance means the content often reflects a strong gender bias. Emma Paling recently explored the problem for The Atlantic, interviewing Julia Adams, a professor of sociology at Yale University.

“Most people look at Wikipedia, and see the text, and assume that it’s unproblematically produced by volunteers and always on a trajectory to improvement,” said Adams. “But that is simply not the case.”

Read the full article here.

Recently in New York, two siblings were severely beaten—one to death—by their parents and other members of the congregation of the Word of Life for wanting to leave the “faith.” This cult is based in a former school building in which members of the church live and congregate in isolation from the greater community.

Sociologist Bernadette Barton told Broadly Vice:

When a group is isolated, they’re not beholden to a larger organization. If they’re part of a hierarchy, they’ll answer to other folks, so there are more likely to be other eyes on abuse and interventions into it. The more isolated a group is, the more likely violence can emerge.

Barton describes a “sin/fall” paradigm, where members of the cult are faced with psychological, emotional, and physical threats if they deviate from church ideology. She elaborates:

It excludes people, creates a climate of fear, scares participants, makes people monitor their own and other’s behaviors and thoughts, enables physical and sexual abuse, while absolving all individuals of wrong-doing since all of this is done (presumably) by divine order.

Traditional norms of feminine behavior encourage women to pledge sexual abstinence before marriage, instilling values of female sexual innocence and purity. In contrast, these norms suggest male sexual activity before marriage legitimizes their masculinity. Men who choose to abstain from sexual activity until marriage remain largely unexamined. In 2008, Ph.D. sociology candidate Sarah Diefendorf studied a male abstinence support group called The River to explore male beliefs about sexuality and masculinity in relation to sexual abstinence. Diefendorf discussed her findings in a recent Huffington Post article.

Men within The River used the group as a support network to resist various forms of sexual temptation, including masturbation, pornography, and same-sex attraction. While the resistance of sexual desires often proved difficult, these men believed that by waiting for sex, an act they believed God deemed sacred, they would enjoy fulfilling sex lives as married men. And by sharing their struggles with sexuality, the men in the group still “reinforce the norm that they are highly sexual men, even in the absence of sexual activity.”

During interviews conducted three years later, Diefendorf discovered that most of the men were still wrestling with their sexual urges even now that they were married. They no longer had a peer support network holding them accountable and did not feel comfortable speaking to their female spouses, since their group as taught that women are nonsexual.

Diefendorf explained, “After 25 years of being told that sex is something dangerous that needs to be controlled, the transition to married (and sexual) life is difficult, at best, while leaving men without the support they need. Women, meanwhile, are often left out of the conversation entirely.”

Gun violence has become a constant in American life. As of October 13th, there have been 10,348 shooting related deaths and 21,012 shooting-related injuries in 2015 already, per the Gun Violence Archive. What happens to the thousands who are shot and injured each year? Jooyoung Lee is a sociologist at the University of Toronto who studies the lives of gunshot victims. In a recent interview with The Trace, Lee talked about the different difficulties his subjects—mostly young, working-class black men—have faced navigating their lives and treating their pain since being shot:

Getting shot really changes a person’s social world; it makes them suspicious of other people. You see them going from young and vibrant to reclusive. They go to public settings, see a crowd, and get anxious that someone is affiliated with the person who shot them. The Fourth of July is a very stressful day for gunshot victims. A lot of the young men talk about how the sound of fireworks would give them flashbacks. I had one guy who told me he was out at a bowling alley with friends, the first time he’d been out since he’d been shot, and he was having a great time, and then the sounds of pins crashing caused a flashback. He had the feeling that everyone in the place was potentially the killer. This kind of thing makes it very difficult to resume everyday life.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Publish. Publish. Publish.

Academics are expected to regularly publish in highly regarded journals as a measure of productivity, and therefore success. Whether as a graduate student hoping to land the perfect job or an early-career professor tackling the demanding process to earn tenure, academics experience a lot of stress.

According to a recent study published in the American Sociological Review, research that delves deeper into already known concepts (what the authors call traditional research) is more likely to get published than research that contributes new connections and ideas to the field (innovative work). But researchers writing innovative studies are more likely to be awarded for their work, as their research has a higher impact. So, if academics are more likely to publish traditional work at a higher rate than risk no publications coming out of innovative research, we can see where the tension arises.

Jacob Foster, one of the authors of the study, told the UCLA Newsroom,

Published papers that make a novel connection are rare but more highly rewarded. So what accounts for scientists’ disposition to pursue tradition over innovation? Our evidence points to a simple explanation: Innovative research is a gamble whose payoff, on average, does not justify the risk. It’s not a reliable way to accumulate scientific reward.