Who gets remembered, and how we remember them, isn’t left to chance.  Images of the past are malleable, and memories are often altered and changed based on present-day events and actors.

 Today, many are remembering Martin Luther King Jr.  And as CNN points out, some ways of remembering, like the new Martin Luther King Jr. memorial, are quite controversial.

The man himself was controversial, notes LaSalle University sociology professor Charles Gallagher. King — bound up with issues of racial and economic inequality that spotlight America’s worst sins — is a “Rorschach test,” Gallagher says, that people see in King what they want to see.

Still, few of the organizers of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial in Washington may have expected that every little detail would be so scrutinized, criticism that has continued right up to the first Martin Luther King Jr. Day since it opened last fall.

Just last Friday, the Department of the Interior announced that a quotation on the memorial would be changed.  The quotation, which was paraphrased from one of his sermons, reads “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.”  The longer passage was premised on a conditional that began, “If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice.”  Critics argued that the quote was taken out of context and makes King appear arrogant.

Indeed, King isn’t the first luminary to have a quotation misused. The Jefferson Memorial, across the Tidal Basin “juxtaposes fragments (of Jefferson’s writings) … to create the impression that he was very nearly an abolitionist,” writes historian James Loewen, author of “Lies My Teacher Told Me.”

The memorial was also criticized for freezing a person in stone, something that certainly isn’t unique to this memorial.

Sculptor Daniel Chester French’s Abraham Lincoln, across the Mall, is a gorgeous work, but he is now brooding for all eternity. Franklin D. Roosevelt, nearby, was originally represented by a statue apparently based on the weary president at Yalta; a second FDR, showing him in a wheelchair, was added after protests.

So how is King remembered, and why does it matter?  Check out the complete CNN article for a thoughtful discussion that draws on the insights of sociologists, public health professors, and historians.

As sociologists, sometimes we just can’t stop connecting concepts we read in magazines or on TV to our field.  So, it’s always nice when we see the concepts are connected for us and, more importantly, for a broader public.

As I was exploring internship opportunities for my students this semester, I ran across a tidbit of sociological knowledge on the the website of an organization that supports battered women and children (Casa de Esperanza).  It reads:

Casa de Esperanza works to enhance social capital because we believe that it decreases domestic violence. Social capital refers to the trust, reciprocity, information and co-operation that are developed through social networks.

And it even cites Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone!  Needless to say, I was impressed.

Columbia University was going to offer a course on Occupy Wall Street this spring, the New York Post and others reported last week—but it looks like that announcement was premature.

The anthropology class at Columbia was to be called “Occupy the Field: Global Finance, Inequality, Social Movement.” However, administrators said the course didn’t go through the necessary faculty approval process in order to be offered this spring, according to Bwog, the blog of Columbia University’s monthly undergraduate magazine, The Blue and White. Hence, the course is no longer listed among the department’s offerings for the semester starting Jan. 17.

Students at NYU, though, will be able to get credit for studying the movement in an undergraduate course in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, taught by Professor Lisa Duggan.

“Occupy Wall Street has done us all the service of illuminating [the fact] that the economy operates within the framework of political, social and cultural conflicts, and not outside them,” Duggan told Washington Square News, NYU’s daily student newspaper.

The university will also offer a graduate course on OWS with Professor of Sociology Jeff Goodwin.

Fights between parents and their teenagers have become a symbol of growing up.  But, new research covered by National Public Radio found that stress and weariness aside, these arguments can provide lifelong benefits to children.

The research, led by Psychologist Joseph P. Allan, videotaped over 150 thirteen-year-olds describing their biggest argument with their parents.  The tapes were then shared with the parents.

 “Parents reacted in a whole variety of ways. Some of them laughed uncomfortably; some rolled their eyes; and a number of them dove right in and said, ‘OK, let’s talk about this,'” he says.  It was the parents who said [they] wanted to talk who were on the right track, says Allen. “We found that what a teen learned in handling these kinds of disagreements with their parents was exactly what they took into their peer world,” with all its pressures to conform to risky behavior like drugs and alcohol.

The teens were then interviewed at ages 15 and 16.

“The teens who learned to be calm and confident and persuasive with their parents acted the same way when they were with their peers,”…They were able to confidently disagree, saying ‘no’ when offered alcohol or drugs. In fact, they were 40 percent more likely to say ‘no’ than kids who didn’t argue with their parents.

For other kids, passivity in arguments with their parents seemed to be taken into their peer groups, where they were more likely to acquiesce when offered alcohol or drugs. So, effective arguing appears to help teens deal with negative peer pressure.

Their advice to parents?  First, listen. In their study, the kids listened to their parents when their parents listed to them.  It might be tough, but it could be helping children in the long-run.

 “We tell parents to think of those arguments not as nuisance but as a critical training ground,” he says. Such arguments, he says, are actually mini life lessons in how to disagree — a necessary skill later on in life with partners, friends and colleagues on the job.

Just before the dawn of the New Year, Marketplace Money’s Eve Troeh hoped to find some silver lining, or at least an optimistic take, on one thing so many Americans now share: the job hunt. What she really seemed to find in her American Public Media report, though, was that unemployment remains as alienating an experience as it is a common one. And, as USC sociologist Karen Sternheimer explained, it’s a cruddy thing for anyone to go through, including the so-called highly-educated unemployed.

“One of the biggest measures of class is something called ‘occupational prestige’,” said Sternheimer. “Part of our status is based not just on how much money we have or make, but on kind of what other people think of what we do.” As Troeh went on, “When professionals lose jobs, then, [Sternheimer] says we’re more likely to blame them—even though we all know that layoffs in recent years happened across the board.”

Echoing Joe Soss’s comments in the Star Tribune, as covered in Citings & Sightings a couple of days ago, Sternheimer affirmed, “There’s still a lot of antipathy towards people who don’t have jobs. The myth of the American Dream says that you’ve either succeeded or failed based on your own merit.” More surprisingly, though, Sternheimer tells Marketplace Money that “her research on the Great Depression shows that in tough times, we cling more closely to that dream, that our own hard work determines our fate, rather than blame bigger economic forces.” This can result in a lot of blame for everyone’s “bad times” being placed on the unemployed themselves. And when you are the unemployed, the depression and alienation compound.

Etiquette, in fact, is where the radio story ended: “Etiquette expert Peter Post at the Emily Post Institute says relationships get ruined over a job loss. Even generous offers have to be made carefully.” This is to say, just as talking salary isn’t usually palatable for Americans, talking no salary is touchy, too. For more tips and/or commiseration, be sure to check out the full report, available online at American Public Media.

In some circles the social sciences are criticized for “discovering” what common sense supposedly already tells us. But sometimes, societal trends can cause even the experts to scratch their heads. During the recent recession, for example, unemployment rates in the United States rose sharply and many scholars and politicians expected crime rates to follow suit. According to recently released FBI crime statistics, though, they haven’t.

Violent crimes have fallen 6.4 percent in the last year while property crimes dropped 3.7 percent. Plus, last year’s crime decrease was just a continuation of a downward pattern since 2008; since 1991, the homicide rate has fallen 51 percent and property crimes dropped by 64 percent.

When this data went public, news sources like National Public Radio, the LA Times, and MSNBC.com looked to see how experts in criminology reacted to the findings. Richard Rosenfeld, professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and former president of the American Society of Criminology, was, “surprised by the overall decline in both violent and property crime during and since the recent recession.” He went on, “I’ve studied crime trends in relation to economic conditions for some time, and the 2008-09 recession is the first time since WWII that crime rates have not risen during a substantial downturn in the economy.” Many, including Rosenfeld, attribute some of the decline to smarter policing, but admit that can’t account for all of it, since in many places policing hasn’t changed much in the past ten years or during the recession.

Franklin Zimring, a criminologist and UC Berkeley law professor, was also a puzzled to see a decline in crime during the last three years when incarceration rates have stalled and the economy has soured. “By both the left- and right-wing leading indicators we should be in a lot of trouble—except [we’re] not,” Zimring maintains. “Everything we thought we knew are deeply challenged by events by the last three years.” In an email written to msnbc.com, Zimring does, though, suggest one possible factor affecting this decline: Inflation. “High rates of inflation are connected with high crime rates, so when inflation drops we should expect corresponding declines in crime, in the first instance property crime.”

Although bewilderment in the face of a crime decline is a relatively good problem to have, most scholars and public officials still agree on the importance of getting to the bottom of what’s causing it—particularly if it might be replicable.

The University of Minnesota’s Joe Soss, recently interviewed for the Office Hours podcast about his new book Discliplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race, was featured in the Star Tribune thoughtfully explaining the lessons of his research for the Lori Sturdevant article “It’s Rarely a Luxury to Be in Need of Charity.” As Soss put it, “Our notions about who’s deserving of help and who isn’t are rooted in notions about individual effort and individual success or failure.” But, he told Sturdevant, “It’s become almost a Catch-22… You’re undeserving if you haven’t worked hard enough to lift yourself out of poverty. If you had worked hard, you wouldn’t be poor. So if you’re poor, you must be undeserving.”

And, the columnist relates, maybe, “In frontier Minnesota, hard work could rather reliably produce self-sufficiency. Suspicion of the poor as lazy or profligate arose easily when land was cheap or free, the population was exploding, and harvests of timber, grain and, eventually, iron ore were abundant beyond imagining.” Now that hard times are upon so many, it’s harder to write off the jobless or the poor as deserving of their fate. In this way, the Great Recession may also become something of a Great Equalizer, “opening eyes to to a new reality about work in America,” writes Sturdevant. As Joe Soss said, “Tougher times make people more likely to understand that poverty isn’t just about individual choices.”

Even in a publication seemingly devoted to the cultivation of erotic capital, you hardly expect to find the term bandied about—but there it is, on p. 75 of the January 2012 issue of Marie Claire magazine. In an article called “Celebrity Mistresses: The New Deal” (which bears the lede, “Meet the young generation of entrepreneurial ‘other women.’ They’re not ashamed, they’re not sorry, and they’re cashing in”) author Kiri Blakely compares celebrity dalliances of the past and present.

Blakely writes:

In the past, celebrity mistresses seemed less eager for the public’s attention. If their ultimate goal was fame and a payday, they were far more subtle about it… Back when mistresses could be depended on for discretion, famous cheaters had the upper hand. They got an extramarital roll in the sack, and, with their lovers hidden from view, they could still preserve their images as upstanding married men.

But, she goes on, “Today’s ‘other women’ know how to get media outlets on the line, lawyer up, and negotiate like fortune 500 CEOs… You have to wonder: who is using whom in these affairs?”

Blakely closes her article with a quick summary of one of the mechanisms at work in these high-profile romps:

If, as sociologist Catherin Hakim writes in her book Erotic Capital, men and feminists have conspired to trick women into giving away their sexuality for free, then these women have renegotiated the payoff. And stars like Kutcher are left with the consequences.

As it turns out, other “lady mags” have taken up the topic of erotic capital (look no further than Elle [“Eros in the Office,” June 2011]), but so have the “lad mags” (see Men’s Health’s “Spark Her Sex Drive,” which tries to help readers “invest in” and “bank” their own erotic capital). No matter how it’s being used, it’s always interesting to watch a piece of a academic jargon make its way into the mainstream. Perhaps it’s just a faster process when the term’s a bit titillating!

We often hear how Facebook, Twitter, and other social media contribute to protests and demonstrations by allowing activists to express their views or coordinate their actions. Social media were a big part of Arab Spring, but they were also a large part of the Reformation, says an article from The Economist. Nearly 500 years ago, Martin Luther went viral by circulating pamphlets, woodcuts, and other social media of that day in order to spread the message of religious reform.

The start of the Reformation is generally explained as a three-step process: 1. Martin Luther gets fed up with members of the Catholic Church asking for money to free souls, 2. Luther pins a list of 95 Theses (in Latin) to the Church door, and 3. The Reformation has begun. But, a closer look reveals Martin Luther spent more time thinking about social media:

The unintentional but rapid spread of the “95 Theses” alerted Luther to the way in which media passed from one person to another could quickly reach a wide audience. “They are printed and circulated far beyond my expectation,” he wrote in March 1518 to a publisher in Nuremberg who had published a German translation of the theses. But writing in scholarly Latin and then translating it into German was not the best way to address the wider public. Luther wrote that he “should have spoken far differently and more distinctly had I known what was going to happen.” For the publication later that month of his “Sermon on Indulgences and Grace”, he switched to German, avoiding regional vocabulary to ensure that his words were intelligible from the Rhineland to Saxony. The pamphlet, an instant hit, is regarded by many as the true starting point of the Reformation.

While it sounds pretty different (imagine communicating through woodcuts!), the media environment Luther circulated in shared some similarities with today. It was a decentralized system in which participants distributed messages through sharing—Luther passed the text of a pamphlet to a friendly printer, who could print the small text in a day or two.  Copies of this first edition, which cost about the same as a chicken, spread through the town they were printed in, being picked up by traveling merchants, preachers, or traders, and spread across the country. Local printers would then reprint their own editions, much like Facebook “shares” or Twitter “retweets.”

And, as with collective action in the 21st century, social media could  be dangerous during the Reformation:

In the early years of the Reformation expressing support for Luther’s views, through preaching, recommending a pamphlet or singing a news ballad directed at the pope, was dangerous. By stamping out isolated outbreaks of opposition swiftly, autocratic regimes discourage their opponents from speaking out and linking up. A collective-action problem thus arises when people are dissatisfied, but are unsure how widely their dissatisfaction is shared, as Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, has observed in connection with the Arab spring. The dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia, she argues, survived for as long as they did because although many people deeply disliked those regimes, they could not be sure others felt the same way. Amid the outbreaks of unrest in early 2011, however, social-media websites enabled lots of people to signal their preferences en masse to their peers very quickly, in an “informational cascade” that created momentum for further action.

Something very similar happened in the Reformation. A1523-24 surge in reform-pamphlet popularity (including those written by Luther and many others) served as a collective signaling mechanism of Luther’s support. Luther had been declared a heretic, but, because of his supporters, he was able to escape execution, and the Reformation became established in much of Germany. The power of social media is anything but new.

Talk about a chronic condition! According to new research from the European Journal of Public Health, higher rates of poor health among women aren’t just the result of reporting bias, but higher actual rates of chronic health problems. MSNBC.com’s “Vitals” section (via MyHealthNews Daily) covers the research, which included interviews and medical records data from over 29,000 Spaniards, and reports:

…when the researchers matched up the number of chronic conditions each person had with his or her health rating, the gender difference disappeared. Having a higher number of chronic conditions correlated with poorer self-rated health to the same degree in both genders.

For men and women with the same conditions, or the same number of conditions, women were no more likely to claim poorer health.

To put these numbers into some context, reporter Sarah C.P. Williams sought out British sociologist Ellen Annandale, who studies the connections between gender and health. Dr. Annandale confirmed the long-standing notion that women simply communicate better and more often with their doctors, but don’t actually experience worse health outcomes than men—but said this new research upends that idea and offers clues to better medical treatment for people of all genders:

“Gender influences that way that people are treated and diagnosed in health systems,” Annandale said. “It influences the kind of health conditions that men and women suffer from, the way people relate to their own bodies, and what kind of access to health care they have.”

Understanding gender differences in health can help scientists and doctors find ways to better treat patients, she said.

“Women generally live longer than men, but in many countries that gap in life expectancy has been decreasing over time. One of the reasons for that is thought to be that men’s health is improving, but women’s is not.”