In January 2008, we became the editors of Contexts, the American Sociological Association’s public outreach magazine. As part of our editorship and with support from the College of Liberal Arts here at the University of Minnesota, we launched contexts.org as an online supplement to the print publication. In the past two years, largely on the popularity of our independent bloggers and hard working graduate students, contexts.org has become one of the most prominent and vibrant sociology sites on the Internet.

As we enter the final year of our editorship of the print publication (which itself will welcome a new publishing partner in January), we have been thinking seriously about how to maintain the burgeoning web content we’ve developed over the past couple of years as well as how to enhance the mass media visibility and influence of social science more generally. To this end, we are launching the new web platform you are reading right now: The Society Pages.

The Society Pages will be an online, multidisciplinary social science project headquartered in the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. Initially, The Society Pages will work much like the contexts.org site has in the past. It will be a mix of Minnesota-produced content along with community blogs from around the world that we host, support, and publicize. We will also continue to host contexts.org as long as we edit the print publication (and well beyond that, if the ASA and future editors want us to continue).

Eventually, we plan to extend the scope of The Society Pages beyond sociology to encompass the full range of the social sciences. Indeed, over the course of the next year, we’ll bring some new, interdisciplinary authors and contributing authors (from Minnesota and far beyond) into the mix and begin rolling out a steady stream of new content and features. Our goal is to make The Society Pages the go-to destination for social science online. And we will use this little spot—the Editors’ Desk—to play cheerleader, project leader, and sounding board along the way.

We’re excited to get started with The Society Pages. If you’re as excited as we are about the possibilities for social science online, or if you’d just like to get your name in the society pages, let us know! Any questions? Feel free to email us at editors@thesocietypages.org. Otherwise, we hope you will make thesocietypages.org a regular stop on your Internet travels.

Chris Uggen & Doug Hartmann
Editors