If this week you are celebrating a winter holiday, TSP sends warm wishes as you gather with friends and family. If this is not a holiday time, we wish you peace, rest, and safety. Below, we have one new piece to share and round up some holiday classics. We’ll see you next year!
Today, news broke that Brittney Griner was released from Russian custody. Check out this piece from partner Engaging Sports on the working conditions of WNBA players that, among other consequences, leads players to seek highly lucrative off-season contracts internationally.
This week is our final board meeting of the semester. It’s a bittersweet moment, where we reflect on the accomplishments of the semester and look ahead to coming weeks that (hopefully) feature some more rest, relaxation, and connection. The wheels at TSP do not stop turning during the semester break, we continue to have editor’s meetings, publish new content, re-post our “Best of the Year” pieces, and plan for the coming semester. All the same, we’ll miss seeing each other every Friday morning. Thankfully, we know the weeks will fly by, re-energizing us and inspiring fresh ideas and content for the site.
This week, nominations for our “Best of 2022” went out. We rounded up exceptional pieces from our board members, partner, and community pages. It is a really fun opportunity to reflect on the year and all that we have accomplished. We look forward to announcing the winners and re-running this pieces in our “Best of” series during the semester break.
Conflict constructively contributes to community life according to Evelyn Perry for Contexts. Perry draws on her ethnographic experience in one of the few economically and racially mixed neighborhoods in the city of Milwaukee to show how differences do produce confrontations between neighbors but residents are able to continually re-negotiate their sense of order together.
In honor of The Society Pages’ tenth anniversary in 2022 we’re highlighting the contributions and ongoing work of our superb alumni!
This week we caught up with Erik Kojola who had this to say about his time on the board:
“I have fond memories of our Friday morning meetings pitching ideas for articles and talking about current events. I did several podcasts that enabled me to interview scholars doing exciting research and as a graduate student talk with some leading sociologists. One of my first interviews was with Michael Burawoy which was exciting and nerve-racking to interview a scholar who’d made major contributions to theories of class and labor as well as advancing public sociology. I was able to spend an hour talking with a former ASA president and to have an in-depth discussion about how he conceptualized public sociology. I also compiled a roundtable about climate change in the 2016 US Presidential election and got leading environmental sociologists to analyze the stakes of climate action and climate justice.
Now, I’m an assistant professor at Texas Christian University and have recently started some community-based and collaborative research on environmental racism in Fort Worth. I’m working with several community organizations to do applied research that will help them advocate for policies to protect public health and limit pollution in black neighborhoods. I’m also having students write policy reports and op-ed articles about environmental justice issues in Texas so they learn how to communicate issues to broader publics.
I continue to use TSP in my classes. I have students read Discoveries articles in my research methods classes to learn about different research methods and how to summarize research.”
Thanks for all your contributions to TSP and your ongoing public sociology work, Erik!
Backstage with TSP
This year, we have a group of talented undergraduates on our board. This is new for us and has meant changing up how we do “pitches,” where board members bring in recent social scientific articles and we consider whether to write them up. Returning board members have been pitching articles for both themselves and new board members to cover. There’s a lot of moving pieces trying to match articles with the interests of our board members but it’s been a fun process and has meant that, sometimes, people are writing up pieces that aren’t neatly within their comfort zone. This can be challenging but helps us pursue our broad, “big tent” vision of sociology.
One thing we’re constantly thinking about at TSP is how much information to include in our Discoveries, short write-ups of new academic research. We want to make sure we’re accurately representing the research and the importance of the finding(s) but we also want to make sure we aren’t bombarding our readers with lots of jargon or complexity that makes the piece less accessible. It’s a tough balance to strike and something we always discuss in on our weekly Discoveries workshops.
Alumni Spotlight
In honor of The Society Pages’ tenth anniversary in 2022 we’re highlighting the contributions and ongoing work of our superb alumni!
This week we caught up with TSP alum Kyle Green. Here’s what he had to say about his time on the TSP board:
“Over the course of my four years with TSP I was involved with most, if not all, parts of the project. I think am proud of that. However, I am sure I am proud of four things: (1) Getting to be part of the initial transition from Contexts to TSP when all dreams seemed possible; (2) Working on the Getting Culture volume with Stephen Suh; (3) Hosting and producing many episodes of the Office Hours podcast with Sarah Lageson; (4) Creating, hosting, and producing the Give Methods a Chance podcast with Sarah Lageson. But really, it isn’t what I wrote/recorded as much as the friends I made (I started writing this statement as a joke but decided it is actually right by the time I finished typing).
TSP has completely shaped my vision of the discipline and what it could/should be, for better or worse (usually better). For example, I still am surprised when I meet an academic who does not believe in the inherent value of producing accessible work that can be consumed rather easily by the sociologically interested. I also owe my big tent understanding of the discipline to my time at TSP and I owe my ability to have conversations with scholars across the discipline to my time spent listening to grad board members pitch ‘citings’ from a variety of subfields. Most directly linked to my time at TSP, I created the Give Theory a Chance podcast and have recorded almost 50 episodes with scholars across the social sciences. I can honestly say that I would not be the researcher and teacher I am today without my time spent as part of the TSP crew.”
Kyle Green is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at SUNY Brockport. He is also host and producer of the Give Theory a Chance podcast.
We’ve got something in the works (shhhhh!) that has us thinking about the books and articles that first got us interested in sociology. It’s fun to see the variation (from Marx to Evicted) and exciting to think about how we’d communicate what we love about these works to a public audience.
In honor of The Society Pages’ tenth anniversary in 2022 we’re highlighting the contributions and ongoing work of our superb alumni!
This week we caught up with TSP alum Hollie Nyseth Nzitatira. Here’s what she had to say about her time on the TSP board:
“The Society Pages is where I learned that social scientific writing does not need to be bad writing. That might sound a bit extreme, but after reading pages (and pages) of sociological theory written centuries ago, I thought that writing like a sociologist meant writing long paragraphs full of jargon. Thankfully, TSP changed this. As part of TSP, I learned the value of writing for broader audiences, as well as how to speak without academic terms that do not resonate with the public.
I have used this ability to translate my research on genocide into broader settings in several ways, including but not limited to the following:
Creating policy reports for governments and nonprofits;
Giving a TEDx talk;
Publishing an op-ed in the New York Times;
Speaking about my research on C-SPAN;
Writing grants for general audiences;
Consulting with museums as they create new wings on genocide; and
Training high school teachers.”
Hollie Nyseth Nzitatira is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the the Ohio State University. Her research examines why and how genocide happens and how countries rebuild in the aftermath.
NPR and the LA Times spoke with Nancy Wang Yuen ahead of the Anna May Wong quarter release next Monday. Wong will be the first Asian American featured on U.S. currency.
In honor of The Society Pages’ tenth anniversary in 2022 we’re highlighting the contributions and ongoing work of our superb alumni!
Allison Nobles, former graduate managing editor, shared this reflection of her time with TSP:
“TSP always felt like a little community within the larger sociology department. I genuinely wanted to get to our Friday board meetings early so I could catch up with everyone. Now, as I consider future career goals, I find myself coming back to my time at TSP — not only as a place where I refined many transferable skills, but even more so as an exemplar of what a workplace could be like. “
Allison Nobles is a graduate student at the University of Minnesota. She studies how adults learn about sex. Allison is preparing for an “alt-ac” career outside of the academy.
