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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.

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New and Noteworthy

On the site, Aisha Upton-Azzam traces the roots of the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, passed in March, in more than a century of anti-lynching activism by individuals and organizations.

Worth a Listen (Sociologically Speaking)

Give Theory a Chance brings some great theoretical insights to your ears. Kyle Green spoke with  Dr. Andrew McCumber on Raymond Williams and Dr. Amanda McMillan Lequieu on Kai Erikson.

Backstage with TSP

Here in Minnesota we’re gearing up for the start of a new semester next week. We’re looking forward to welcoming the student board back in-person to our meeting room overlooking the mighty Mississippi. The start of a new semester always bring a wave of energy and excitement and we’re looking forward to what it means for the site!

From the Archives

With black female athletes like Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka competing at the U.S. open this week check out this piece from partner Engaging Sports on how Osaka’s 2021 protest of the french open highlights the misogynoir and racial capitalism of professional sports.

More from our Partner & Community Pages

Courtney Szto wrote for Engaging Sports on how conversations about cycling and environmentalism need to consider the eco-cost of manufacturing and consuming sporting goods like bicycles.

Krista K. Westrick-Payne wrote for Council on Contemporary Families’ blog on new research from the National Center for Family and Marriage Research showing that both marriages and divorces fell during the early days of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020.

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.

Worth a Read (Sociologically Speaking)

Daniel Cueto-Villalobos rounded-up research on job insecurity, expectations for work, and emotion that puts the “great resignation” into sociological perspective

New and Noteworthy

For Contexts’ blog Alfredo Huante and Michael L. Rosino analyze coverage of the backlash against teaching critical race theory to distill the tenets of this racialized moral panic

Citings and Sightings

Axios spoke with Marianne Cooper to provide context for new findings that show that young women do out-earn young men in a limited number of metro areas

More from Our Partner and Community Pages

Nikoleta Sremac wrote about the external and internal pressures threatening Serbia’s official position of neutrality in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies’ blog

L. Dugan Nichol wrote about the precarious labor conditions of professional skateboarders for Engaging Sports

Amy L. Stone wrote about their research on queer carnival and how Mardi gras celebrations offer an opportunity for parents of LGBTQ people to provide support for the Council on Contemporary Families’ blog

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New and Noteworthy

Board member Mason Jones wrote up research from Vicki Lens that shows that, in family law court rooms, low-income moms face expectations of what “good mothers” do that do not acknowledge the structural barriers they face when parenting.

Worth a Read, Sociologically Speaking

Board member Jake Otis rounded up social science research that places the current wave of labor strikes in context.

Backstage with TSP

This week we turned our focus to writing and will discuss the first chapter of Becker’s classic Writing for Social Scientists. It’s an excellent book and the first chapter got me thinking about vulnerability and shame in the writing process. Becker does a great job of articulating that part of what makes writing so difficult is that we have to be vulnerable. When we write we are putting ourselves out there. We worry about getting it right at TSP. We worry that maybe we aren’t quite capturing what the author meant by that phrase, or maybe we don’t really understand the complex statistical technique used in that exciting new article, so maybe we shouldn’t write about it for the site. But we do anyway, in part, because we have the advantage of being really close to why writing in spite of fear matters. We hope our writing helps bring social scientific findings to a a public that would otherwise not have access to them. Having such a lofty vision means that the stakes can feel really high at times but it also helps motivate us to work together to get words on the (digital) page.

More from Our Partner and Community Pages

Council for Contemporary Families’ blog re-posted a piece from Tyler Jamison on the skills needed to break-up a partnership with care.

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TSP Edited Volumes

Happy Friday. This week we rounded-up research on women in combat sports and the politics of public memorials. As always, our partner and community pages also bring you great content.

There’s Research On That

A Woman’s Place is in the Octagon by Jillian LaBranche. We round-up research on how women in combat sports confront gender norms.

The Politics of Public Memorials by Daniel Cueto-Villalobos. We review research on public memorials, from immediate to official, highlighting the contested nature of these public projects.

From Our Partners:

Contexts

Cross University Collaboration for STEM Education and Social Justice by Monica J. Carter, Luis A. Colón, Anna De Cheke Qualls, Kamla Deonauth, and Panos S. Shiakolas

Council on Contemporary Families

New Work: African American mothers’ racial stressors are related to their parenting and adolescents’ academic and behavioral outcomes by Kathleen Holloway, Fatima Varner, and Stephen T. Russell

From Our Community Pages:

• Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies considers Minnesota’s acknowledgement of the Khojaly massacre as genocide, and the politics of naming.

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TSP Edited Volumes

This week, our partner and community pages brought you great content, including a conversation on Erving Goffman and musings on social roles and dying. They also considered the aftermath of famine, and the relationship between “nagging” and cheating.

From Our Partners:

Council on Contemporary Families

The Relationship between Nagging and Cheating by Alicia Walker

From Our Community Pages:

• Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies considers how the 1932 Ukrainian famine was shaped by the past and reached into the future.
• Give Theory A Chance speaks with Jonathan Wynn on Erving Goffman.
• A Backstage Sociologist talks about social roles and socialization, eleven years after a terminal cancer diagnosis.

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Welcome back. This week, we brought you a special feature on how sociological tools are helping make sense of the January 6 events at the capitol. Plus, new research on how social participation contributes to alcohol consumption among older adults.

Special Features

Sociology of the Siege by Brooke Chambers, Jillian LaBranche, and Nikoleta Sremac. In this special feature, we show how reporters, politicians, and scholars alike are using sociological concepts and ideas to understand the assault on the capitol.

Discoveries

Socializing and Substance Abuse for Older Adults by Mahala Miller. We cover new research that suggests that greater social participation might increase alcohol consumption among older adults, a population facing increasing rates of alcohol abuse.

From Our Partners:

Council on Contemporary Families

Research reports: National Spouses Day is Next Week…. Feeling Any Pressure? A Fact Sheet on Prospects for Marriage in Contemporary America by Daniel Carlson and Stephanie Coontz.

From Our Community Pages:

• Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies considers how to explore settler colonialism theory in the secondary school classroom.
• Give Theory A Chance shares conversations with  Dr. Jocelyn Viterna on teaching our ugly roots and  Dr. Alex Channon on Stephen Lyng and edgework.

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Happy new year from TSP! This week we shared some of our favorite content from 2020, and honored friend and colleague Ron Anderson. Plus, as always, great content from our partner and community pages!

Editor’s Desk:

Why Social Distancing is the Wrong Phrase by Ron Anderson. In memoriam of beloved colleague and friend, Ron Anderson, we shared his writing on the “social” in “social distancing.” In the coming weeks we will share more of Ron’s writing.

Discoveries:

Best of 2020: Make Yourself at Home, Unless You’re Renting by Amy August. We re-shared this discovery on the differences in home searching for high and low-income families.

From Our Partners:

Contexts:

Kim Ng’s rise does not solve baseball’s gender and race problems by Margaret Chin.

From Our Community Pages:

• Give Theory A Chance shares a conversation with  Dr. Shai Dromi on Luc Boltanski.
• Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies asks why peaceful protests for Black Lives Matters were met with police brutality.

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