Archive: Mar 2015

As TSP sends its crew off to Kansas City for the Midwest Sociological Science meetings, things keep buzzing along at HQ! Here’s what we’ve been up to:

The Reading List:

“Rating Your Corporate Peers,” by Erik Kojola. Amanda Sharkey and Patricia Bromley investigate certification programs’ influence on corporate social and environmental responsibility in the American Sociological Review.

There’s Research on That!

“The Politics of Peeing,” by Caty Taborda. Research from Suzanne Kessler, Wendy McKenna, Laurel Westbrook, Kristen Schilt, Betsy Lucal, Sheila Cavanagh, and Tey Meadow paints a picture of gender binaries and public space—and, as SocImages puts it, who goes where.

“47 Senators: Cultural Performance and Politics,” by Jack Delehanty. Why an open letter to Iran isn’t really about Iran, with research by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Jonathan Wyrtzen, Craig Calhoun, and Rhys H. Williams. more...

Adam Gopnik is at it again. This time our favorite writer from The New Yorker uses recent public debates about poverty and foreign policy to talk about that oh-so-sociological concept of norms. Gopnick tells us how norms differ from laws: “a law is something that exacts an announced cost for being broken. A norm is something that is so much a part of the social landscape that you wouldn’t think, really, that anyone could break it.” He tells us why these informal rules matter so much to social life (they constitute the unwritten, daily spirit and practice social order requires and law tries to systematize and impose), how they are enforced (like anything else “by bribes and threats and clear punishments” in actual communities and social contexts), and what can happen when they are eroded or violated (basically, all hell can break loose). The underlying irony in the piece is that those “Republican moralists” whom Gopnick says are breaking some of our most sacred political norms are cut from the same cloth as those who claim normative collapses are at the root of poverty and inequality in the United States. But Gopnik doesn’t really dwell on the politics. Rather, he seems mostly to want to edify us all about the meaning and import of norms in human life. He’s the journalist playing sociology professor, and doing a pretty darn good job of it.

Welcome, spring! Here’s some fresh soc to start the season off right.

Office Hours Podcast:

“Victor Rios on Policing Black and Latino Boys,” with Sarah Shannon. A TSP-alum, Shannon talks with Rios about his award-winning book Punished.

The Editors’ Desk:

“Education & Society,” by Chris Uggen. Welcoming TSP’s newest Community Page, under the direction of Rob Warren.

“Midwest Sociological Society Meetings: Register Now!” An update from MSS president Doug Hartmann on the meetings, which will feature Dalton Conley and Lisa Wade.

There’s Research on That!

“Joke’s on You: The Italy/ISIS Twitter Exchange,” by Sarah Catherine Billups. With research from Christie Davies, Elise Kramer, Karen Parkhill, and more.

“Race and the Classroom,” by Neeraj Rajasekar. With research from Sylvia Hurtado, Josh Packard, Lisa M. Nunn, and more.

“How Hate Crimes Count,” by Evan Stewart, Jack Delehanty, Ryan Larson, and Stephen Suh. With research from Ryan King, Jack Glaser, Louise Cainkar, and more.

The Reading List:

“Misdemeanors as a Form of Social Control,” by Ryan Larson. New work from Issa Kohler-Hausmann.

“Egalitarian Dreams, Unequal Marriages,” by Anne Kaduk. Research from David S. Pedulla and Sarah Thebaud.

“Talking Trash: High Status Explanations for Watching Low Brow TV,” by Sarah Catherine Billups. Charles Allan McCoy and Roscoe Scarborough in Poetics.

Give Methods a Chance Podcast:

“Matthew Hughey on His Tripartite Methodological Approach to Understanding Film,” with Kyle Green. TSP alum Green interviews UConn’s Hughey.

Citings & Sightings:

“Subsidizing the Suburban Commute,” by Neeraj Rajasekar. Alexandra Murphy on why social programs must extend to transportation.

“Old Dogs, New Tricks,” by Sarah Catherine Billups. Christine Whelan on SMART goal-setting.

“‘Treat Yo’Self’ to Some Sociology,” by Caty Taborda. Comic and actor Aziz Ansari teams up with sociologist Eric Klinenberg. The rest is… a new book!

“D8TR Dilemma: Millennials ‘Just Talking’, ‘Hanging Out’,” by Sarah Catherine Billups. Kathy Hull on the new terminology of budding relationships.

“Unsurprising Stats: Hollywood Lacks Diversity,” by Caty Taborda. UCLA’s Darnell Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramon see hope for diversity in new entertainment production platforms like Netflix.

Scholars Strategy Network:

“Financial Reforms Alone Cannot Reduce Household Debts for Americans Facing Low Wages and Insecure Jobs,” by Sara M. Bernardo.

“The Harm Done by Media Coverage of Political Disputes about Public Health Measures,” by Erika Fowler and Sarah Gollust.

Council on Contemporary Families:

“An Analysis of New Census Data on Family Structure, Education, and Income,” by Shannon Cavanagh.

A Few from the Community Pages:

• Education and Society debuts its new interview feature with three questions with Josipa Roksa.
• Sociological Images rounds up the best of February, revisits Skull-Face, and talks Irish dance and changing ideas of race.
• Sociology Lens on pronouns, gender policing, and a new(ish) acronym: PGPs.
• Girl w/ Pen! and its latest Manly Musings: Beyond “Bossy” or “Brilliant”? Gender Bias in Student Evaluations.

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The Last Roundup!

My father in law once asked, “How’re things going down at the brain mill?” Well, today I’d respond that these are challenging but exciting times in education. We’ve all read the headlines — powerfully disruptive technologies, troubling race and class disparities, privatization and disinvestment in public schools, historically high tuition and debt loads, school-to-prison disciplinary pipelines, and rapidly changing demographics. While social scientists are doing important research to make sense of these changes, there are few accessible resources for “interested non-experts” who want to keep up with the field. That’s why we’re so happy to welcome our new Education & Society community page to TSP. We’ve been wanting to expand coverage of the “education beat” for years.

An interdisciplinary team of Minnesota-based education researchers writes and curates features like 3 Questions, 250 Words, and Education in the News. You’ll find interviews with education researchers as well as terrific summaries of new education  research appearing in journals like the Annals, American Journal of Education, Sociology of Education, and Social Psychology Quarterly. We’ll be featuring Education & Society on the TSP main and topical pages as well as in our social media feeds. But anyone curious about life at the brain mill should regularly stop by the community page and Twitter feed.

Only two days left to get the early-bird registration fee for the upcoming Midwest Sociological Society meetings in Kansas City, March 26-29th. The meetings, for which I serve as Program Chair are titled “Sociology and Its Publics: The Next Generation.” They will feature keynotes from Occidental’s Lisa Wade, founder and author of the wildly popular TSP blog Sociological Images, and NYU’s Dalton Conley, author of You May Ask Yourself: An Introduction to Thinking Like a Sociologist and Being Black: Living in the Red.

Wade’s presentation, “Doing Pubic Sociology: Notes from a Practitioner,” will take place on 3/26 at 4:30pm.

Conley’s presentation, “Out of the (Ivory) Tower and into the Fire: The Promise and Peril of Outward-Facing Sociology,” will take place on 3/28 at 4:30pm.

For more information and to register for the 78th annual MSS meetings, please visit www.TheMSS.org.