Uncategorized

New and Noteworthy

S Ericson writes up research from Gillian Slee and Mathew Desmond that finds that the higher a neighborhood’s eviction rate, the lower its voter turnout rate is.

From the Archives

The start of a new semester is a great time to re-read this piece from our archives, covering research from Miloš Broćić and Andrew Miles on how the moral values of people who have attended college differ from those that have not.

Sightings & Citings

Adia Harvey Wingfield reflected on the legacy of Barbara Ehrenreich for The Conversation arguing that, while Ehrenreich was not a sociologist, “she adopted what I like to think are the strengths of my discipline”

Backstage with TSP

All the fresh faces and activity around campus has us feeling energized and we’re starting off the semester with a bang! This week, members of our undergrad cohort have their first discovery “workshop,” where we edit one of our short and informative summaries of new research for a public audience. It can be intimidating for new board members to engage in this public editing process for the first time but (as alumni and returning board members can attest) it is a super valuable process that teaches all of us a lot about improving our writing. We’re excited to get started!

More from Our Partners & Community Pages

Our partner, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, just put out a new call for their Spring 2023 issue! Check out more info here.

Council on Contemporary Families’ blog reprinted Joan Maya Mazelis for the The Inquirer on why paying for childcare shouldn’t be so hard.

Sarah Barnes wrote for Engaging Sports on how the WNBA’s working-conditions effect player’s sleep.

Last Week’s Roundup

Sign Up for Inbox Delivery of the Roundup

TSP Edited Volumes

Hey, hey, Everybody. Happy summer!

We’re writing to you from Los Angeles, California, the site of the annual American Sociological Association meetings—the first in-person gathering of the post-Covid era. We’re not sure how many of you will be able to join us, but whether we see you face-to-face or not, we want all of you—our friends and colleagues, contributors, readers, and alumni alike—to know that this is a kind of big year for The Society Pages. 2022 marks the 10^th anniversary of our site! Not bad for a shoe-string, limited liability operation headed up by two sociologists whose business plan included no revenue plans and relied almost exclusively on the energy, enthusiasm, and good will of a volunteer graduate student board. Anyway, happy birthday to us! 

We‘ve spent the past few months reconnecting with our alums and reflecting on  our work (and play) together the past decade. Over the coming fall months we will share highlights, memories, and reflections of these exchanges and our journey together. On the occasion of the ASA meetings, we thought we’d tease just a few of those highlights here.

TSP/Norton edited volumes

One of our first big projects (and a key source of social and financial support) was a series of edited volumes drawn from site content and contributors with WWW Norton. This collaboration resulted in a half dozen books on topics ranging from culture, crime, and race to politics and gender. We’re delighted  that several of these collections are in use, including the methods volume Kyle Green and Sarah Lageson produced out of their fabulous TSP podcast “Give Methods a Chance.” 

Partner & Community Pages

One of the chief functions of our site is to provide a platform for various sociology and social science sites, blogs, and projects to do their thing. The lineup has changed over the years and some of the most avid readers of these sites may not even realize the backstage role TSP plays in hosting them. But we have been proud to help launch and host sites including Contexts.org and the Scholars Strategy Network, to the Council on Contemporary Families (CCF), Sociological Images, Backstage Sociology, and Dispatches from a Dean. Indeed, if you have greatest-hit favorites from these sites that you think we might repost this fall, please let us know!

Graduate board

Our graduate-student run board remains the beating heart of TSP. Most of the original content published on our home page is conceived of, written, and edited by University of Minnesota graduate students. It offers us a chance to connect directly with the future of public sociology. It also serves as an important community for graduate students, a place to connect and share wisdom during the sometimes-lonely PhD journey. We’ll be sharing a few of our favorite pieces from our graduate board over the past decade, but especially want to give a shout-out to the backbone features that constitute the backbone of these efforts: “Discoveries” which tracks new and exciting research in the field, and “There’s Research on That” (TROTs, for short) which provides references for and brief snippets of sociological research and writing. Both share research with an eye toward public conversation and media coverage of current events and contemporary social problems.   

TSP Alumni Features

Our graduate board spent the last semester reaching out and conducting brief interviews with some of our noted alumni. These conversations offered current students the chance to connect with  board alums who have taken the TSP perspective out into the field as professors, community-based researchers, and alt-ac professionals. We’ll be sharing insights and memories from our alumni as well as highlighting the important public work they continue to do. 

So look for all that—and more—in the months ahead! Join us in celebrating our milestone. And thanks to all of the colleagues, contributors, alumni and staff—including web editor Jon Smajda and the indomitable Letta Page, the former TSP-editor and current Contexts managing editor—for all you have done to publicize, support, and use our site over these past 10 years. We are grateful beyond words.

With all the best that sociology has to offer,

Doug and Chris

New and Noteworthy

Board member Mason Jones wrote up research from Hope Harvey on the ways that doubling-up (sharing households with friends and family members) challenges mothers’ identities.

Worth a Read (Sociologically Speaking)

Check out the re-launch statement (!!!!) from our partner the Berkeley Journal of Sociology. It’s been exciting to be in conversation with Tiffany Hamidjaja, Janna Huang, and Elena Amaya over the past year as they worked towards the relaunch, articulated their vision for the next generation of public sociology, and solicited and published contributions. Look here and on our twitter for more coverage of BJS’s important pieces in the coming months!

Backstage with TSP

We’re moving offices here in Minnesota. The shuffling around and organization has us reminiscing about how much we’ve accomplished during the past ten years from where we’ve come from (lots of great Contexts issues from the Hartmann/Uggen days) and who has helped us get there (while we peruse books left behind by the great Evan Stewart). Exciting things to come (like better space for collaboration)!

From the Archives

As record heat waves wash across Europe, bringing along wild fires, check out this piece from TSP alum (and new assistant professor!) Nick Matthews about the challenges firefighters face. A recent Contexts piece from David Burley on using sociology to teach students to fight against climate change is also a relevant read.

More from Our Partner and Community Pages

Alan Martino wrote for partner Council on Contemporary Families on his research on the romantic and sexual experiences of queer disabled people.

New and Noteworthy

Board member Jacob Otis wrote up research from Kate Watson and her colleagues on the challenges school social workers faced during covid-19 pandemic to meet student’s basic needs, emphasizing that the importance of schools extends beyond academics.

Citings and Sightings

Axios covered the latest data drop from the Shift Project, led by sociologists Daniel Schneider and Kristen Harknett, highlighting that most hourly workers at big chains make less than $15 an hour and 80% of low wage workers that qualify for free services still pay fees for tax prep.

Worth a Read, Sociologically Speaking

Council on Contemporary Families’ blog reposted a piece from Ranita Ray on her research about the harassment Black, Latinx, Asian, and recent immigrant girls face in school classrooms.

More from our Partner and Community Pages

Council on Contemporary Families’ blog re-posted Joseph Coleman’s piece When Therapists Encourage Family Cutoffs

Henning Schroeder wrote on the entwining of war and family lore through the lens of a twice-glazed Easter bunny for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies’ blog.

Last Week’s Roundup

Sign Up for Inbox Delivery of the Roundup

TSP Edited Volumes

Spring is in the air here in Minnesota and we’re back with some fresh social-scientific finds :)

New and Noteworthy

Léa Pessin and Elena Maria Pojman released a data visualization in Socius comparing the gendered division of household labor according to different-sex couples’ race and ethnicity.

Citings and Sightings

Ilana M. Horwitz wrote an op-ed for the New York Times on her research examining how teenagers’ religious upbringing shapes their educational outcomes. In particular, she focuses on how religious involvement may prevent despair and enable academic achievement in working-class adolescent boys.

Worth a Read (Sociologically Speaking)

St. Patrick’s day may have been yesterday, but this classic TSP piece from Neeraj Rajesakar, rounding-up research on how Irish people in the U.S. “became” white is always relevant.

Backstage with TSP

This week in our word meeting we’re discussing writing about quantitative findings using a report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. At TSP we’re always trying to strike a balance between reporting social science findings with enough detail to make it clear why they are notable and interesting, and making sure we don’t overwhelm our readers with lots of facts and figures. This is a goal that is important to us as it lies at the center of our mission to make social scientific findings more accessible to a broader public. It is also a never-ending process that we continue to work on perfecting so we look forward to having a board discussion this week to share more ideas for improvement. If you have any *hot tips* drop us a line at thesocietypages@contexts.org.

Last Week’s Roundup

Sign Up for Inbox Delivery of the Roundup

TSP Edited Volumes

New and Noteworthy

After the Child Tax Credit’s historic expansion ended in December, board member Jacob Otis helps us think about what’s next reviewing research on the history of the Child Tax Credit and how it supports families.

Worth a (Look), Sociologically Speaking

Board member S Ericson writes up a data visualization from Benjamin Elbers in Socius showing trends in residential segregation over the past thirty years. Elbers shows that segregation is going down, overall, but is increasing between some racial groups.

Backstage with TSP

I had the pleasure of announcing in this week’s meeting agenda that one of our fearless leaders, Doug Hartmann, is bringing bagels to our board meeting today. (We may be happily munching away on them as you read this). One of the things we missed most about going virtual during covid was the opportunity to gather together in-person not only to get work done but also to be in community with one another. As with all things covid, we aren’t sure what’s next but we feel grateful that, for the time being, we feel safe to be together and carefully lower our masks to take bites of our bagels!

More from Our Partner and Community Pages

Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies’ blog spotlights student Tibisay Navarro-Mana.

Council on Contemporary Families’ blog posted writing from Naomi Lightman and Anthony Kevins, sharing their research on how family policy changes might decrease inequalities in unpaid care work.

Last Week’s Roundup

Sign Up for Inbox Delivery of the Roundup

TSP Edited Volumes

New and Noteworthy

Board member Jake Otis covered new research from Daniel Meyer and Yoona Kim that found that most noncustodial parents are actually satisfied with the child support system, especially if they know the name of a child care worker they can call with questions.

Worth a Read, Sociologically Speaking

Our Hannah Schwendeman rounded-up research on the challenges of mothering in poverty, particularly given the limitations and stigma associated with the welfare system in the United States.

Citings and Sightings

Minnesota Public Radio’s Angela Davis spoke with sociologist (and UMN alum) Amy Blackstone about why more people are choosing not to have children.

Backstage with TSP

As always, we’re working on some super-secret projects behind the scenes that we’re not quite ready to announce yet. What we can say is one of our initiatives this semester involves connecting current board members with TSP alums. We’re excited to help build connections based on shared interests and expertise. A strength of ours has always been our amazing graduate board and it is a credit to our longevity that we can now create a network that links board members past and present and across career stages!

More from Our Partner and Community Pages

Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies’ contributor Henning Schroeder wrote on how controversy in France demonstrates increasing European obsession with flags as nationalist symbols.

Also for CHGS, Catherine Guisan wrote about why we should all care about the shuttering of two Russian NGOS that documented human rights abuses. Meyer Weinshel wrote on Holocaust remembrance day on how the end of the Holocaust was not immediate but, rather, long and uncertain.

Judith R. Smith wrote for the Council on Contemporary Families’ blog on the often-overlooked experiences of older mothers parenting difficult adult children.

Monte Bute wrote for his blog, backstage sociologist, on how his brushes with mortality inspire him to seek new homes for his expansive book collection.

Last Week’s Roundup

Sign Up for Inbox Delivery of the Roundup

TSP Edited Volumes

New and Noteworthy

Board member Mason Jones covered research from Sarah Adeyinka-Skold on how location limits the options of college-educated women dating online, with women of color facing particular challenges finding potential partners that shared their educational and racial background.

Citings and Sightings

Erin Cech wrote for the Atlantic on her research on the “passion principle,” the idea that you love your job, ignores the structural conditions that both place some workers at financial risk and make work feel like drudgery.

Backstage with TSP

This week we were excited to launch a new video format, created by board member Isabel Arriagada. This format pairs summaries of TSP pieces with video imagery in a short and accessible way. This video comes just in time for Thanksgiving, covering research on conflict and family meals. We look forward to seeing where this format takes us, and encourage you to take a watch and share the video on social media if you feel so inclined.

More from Our Partners and Community Pages

We shared our piece on inequality and access to mental health care services over at the World Suffering blog.

The Council on Contemporary Families’ blog reposted Tony Silva’s piece from The Conversation on why some straight men have sex with other men, emphasizing the distinctions between sexual identity and sexual behavior.

Mr. Jones: Bringing the Horrors of the Holodomor to the Screen at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies’ blog.

Last Week’s Roundup

Sign Up for Inbox Delivery of the Roundup

TSP Edited Volumes

Next week marks the anniversary of the tragic, now-world infamous police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. It has been a year of mourning, of anger, angst, and anxiety, of trauma, of uncertainty and fear. To mark this inauspicous milestone, the Minnesota Historical Society Press has produced a new book entitled Sparked: George Floyd, Racism, and the Progressive Illusion. Sparked is a collection of powerful, first-person essays from scholars and other civic leaders documenting how the lived experiences of people of color in the Twin Cities, especially Black residents, stand in contrast to Minnesota’s progressive civic reputation and ideals. It is a book that we believe can be the basis for further, meaningful reflection, even reckoning, with Minnesota’s complicated history with race, racial disparity, white supremacy, and racism itself.

We are proud to say that we here at the Society Pages played a role in helping bring this book into being. It started within days of Floyd’s killing last June. Our former colleague and long-time TSP contributor Walt Jacobs approached us with the idea of doing a small series of essays from scholars, mostly scholars of color, who had worked or studied at the University of Minnesota and since left. He wanted them to write about their experiences of race and racism in Minneapolis and Minnesota more broadly. Jacobs’ core idea was to capture the complexity of race in Minnesota–not only the tragedies and traumas but also the deep paradoxes and even possibilities one encountered in the Twin Cities. This tension was reflected in the series title: “Wretched / Wonderful.”

Amid the trauma and chaos of the summer of 2020, supporting and editing this series felt like something constructive we could do–something rather small and symbolic but constructive nonetheless. Little did we know what it would turn into.

Working with Walt in the weeks that followed, we received dozens of inquiries and requests about the series, from folks eager wanting to know whether if and how they could to contribute to it. With the help of our amazing TSP editor and board member Amy August (now a professor at San Jose State University and one of the co-editors of the MNHSP book with Walt and Wendy Thompson Taiwo), we edited and published over 20 essays over the course of the summer.

These essays would become the backbone of the Sparked volume. In celebration and support of the book, we will–over the course of coming weeks–be re-running the essays that first appeared on TSP last summer in their original form. We do this to recapture the intimacy and immediacy of the essays–and again with great pride in the role our team and these authors played in helping to bring Sparked into being. We will also share some short supplementary discussion materials and questions, developed by Edgar Campos and the editorial teams at Sparked and TSP.

The Historical Society is sponsoring a special launch event tonight featuring four of the book’s contributors–including Walt himself!–talking about the paradoxes and challenges of race and racism in Minnesota and what meaningful steps toward racial justice might look like. We hope it will be the first of many such conversations to come. Details can be found at this link.  

Today we are excited to announce that The Society Pages is the new host of World Suffering & The Compassionate Relief of Suffering. From now on you can find a link to World Suffering under our “Community Pages.”

World Suffering features the unique perspective and writing of Ron Anderson. Ron Anderson, an innovative scholar of technology and society, and a dear and generous colleague to all who were privileged to know him, passed away on December 21, 2020.

In honor of Ron’s legacy, and in recognition of Ron’s support of The Society Pages, TSP now hosts this website. We will continue to feature the content that Ron wrote and curated, and seek submissions for new posts that reflect Ron’s unique perspective and vision.

Here is the vision for World Suffering in Ron’s own words:

“This site has two pillars, understanding world suffering and enabling compassion and other actions to alleviate suffering…This site will attempt to lay out the scope and nature of suffering so that we direct our empathy and compassion more effectively. Look at it as an aid to identifying the suffering most deserving of alleviation or even elimination.”

We are honored to host this website in Ron’s memory, continuing to feature its important content and seeking new posts that reflect Ron’s goal of moving towards “the compassionate relief of suffering.”