To continue honoring the best and most widely disseminated posts on TSP in 2014, we’re moving first into our partner sites. Here are the thought-provoking blockbusters from the editors of Contexts Magazine, the public outreach journal of the American Sociological Society, hosted here online at TSP:

1) “‘I Can Breathe’: The Occasional Fear of Covering Protests,” by Steven Thrasher. A Contexts board member, Thrasher is a professional journalist and photographer with a sociological lens like no other.

2) “Contexts Quicklit: 11 Recent Sociological Findings on Race and the Criminal Justice System,” by Lucia Lykke. University of Maryland grad student Lykke gives a rundown of some of the important numbers for placing today’s widespread protests in, well, context.

3) “Sociology’s Irrelevance in the News,” by Syed Ali. Co-editor Ali largely agrees with Orlando Patterson that sociology, as a discipline, has excused itself from much of the news and offers way to get back in the mix.

Many TSP readers are more interested in research findings than the methodologies used to obtain them. But methods are often an important part of the story, such as new experimental studies that provide powerful tools for measuring discrimination. Backstage at TheSocietyPages, we’re constantly arguing about whether a study’s methods are strong enough to support its findings. And methods are so important that we won’t run a piece unless we agree the underlying research is methodologically sound — regardless of who produced it or where it was published.

So we’ve always wanted a front-stage spot on the site to geek out about methods and explore how we know what we (think we) know. That’s why we’re so delighted to welcome Give Methods a Chance to TSP. GMAC is hosted by Kyle Green and Sarah Lageson, two all-star TSP board members, podcasters, and exceptionally creative multi-method researchers and teachers. Their first couple podcast interviews will give you a sense of the site’s vision and mission: thoughtful discussions with Deborah Carr on how and why we do longitudinal studies, and Francesca Polletta on systematically coding and analyzing people’s stories. Like a good research design, their interviewing approach helps render complex ideas clear and comprehensible.

These podcasts are wonderful for researchers and readers eager to learn how first-rate scholars do their work, but they’ll be an especially useful resource for methods students and teachers. When instructors bring methodology alive for students, as Kyle and Sarah are doing, it has a lasting impact on students. As a department chair, I saw how alumni who pursued careers in business, justice, or social services routinely cited methods as the “sleeper” courses that paved the way for their success. And we hear similar stories from students who became social scientists (like Eric Hedberg, who just sent Facebook props for teaching him paired t-tests 15 years ago — along with his new article on the subject).

We also think Give Methods a Chance will show how sound methodology has far more to do with elegant design principles than technical complexity. As Paola Antonelli of the Museum of Modern Art puts it, good design “combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing.” As you’ll see from Give Methods a Chance, the best social science does precisely the same thing.

In the first weeks of the New Year, we will begin running down some of the most popular and provocative posts from around The Society Pages and its partner sites. But before we all head off to the four corners for winter break, we want to get the plaudits started with our own in-house team.

We are inestimably lucky to have the dedicated, inquisitive, and intellectually rigorous grad board we’ve assembled here at the University of Minnesota. These students volunteer their time, coming to meetings, workshopping ideas, live-editing their pieces together, reaching out to top scholars for interviews and roundtable contributions, and bringing their energies to the site every day. Here are the unscientific but happily presented Best-Of’s in just some of the areas to which these students contribute:

Best of… Citings & Sightings:

“Pushing the Secret Service Director Off the Glass Cliff?” by Matt Gunther

Best of… There’s Research on That!

“Reflecting on Ferguson,” by Evan Stewart

Best… Office Hours Podcast:

“Brian Southwell on Social Networks and Public Understandings of Health and Science,” with Sarah Lageson.

Best of… The Reading List:

“The Fluidity of Racial Categories on the US Census,” by Ryan Larson.

Best of… Roundtables:

“Re-evaluating the ‘Culture of Poverty’, with Mark Gould, Kaaryn Gustafson, and Mario Luis Small,” by Stephen Suh and Kia Heise.

Best of… In-House Titles:

“Atheist Church: A Predictable Paradox,” by Jacqui Frost.

Without fail, the world keeps moving, and, as we like to say here at TSP, “We will do sociology to it.” Here’s how we’ve been putting those sociological imaginations to work since the last Roundup!

Features:

“Racism Retriggered,” by Jennifer D. Carlson. How disproportionate contact with the criminal justice system translates to fewer concealed pistol licenses being issued to African Americans.

The Editors’ Desk:

“Race and the Regulation of Voting,” by Doug Hartmann. When co-editor Chris Uggen’s research informs the NYTimes, Doug’s on the case.

“Ferguson, the Morning After,” by Doug Hartmann. When facts feel futile.

“Ferguson and Football,” by Doug Hartmann. The St. Louis Rams’ “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” entry to their Sunday Football game brings up sport and political protest, as well as the formal and informal policing of black men’s bodies.

There’s Research on That!:

“Volunteer Work: Getting the Gift to Keep on Giving,” by Jacqui Frost. You really shouldn’t swing a turkey, but if you did…

“Veterans’ Day and the Challenges of Civilian Life,” by Evan Stewart. Research on soldiers’ reintegration after service, from social benefits to institutional challenges. more...

It happened Sunday afternoon. I tried to avoid writing about it, not wanting to be distracted from the bigger picture or detract from what I thought—and still think—the most important stories and issues are. But it hasn’t gone away. With this morning’s headlines and so many references to the image I spent several years of my life researching and writing about, I think I have to say something.

I’m talking, of course, about how five members of the St. Louis Rams football team entered the stadium before their game this weekend with their arms and hands raised, enacting the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” pose that has become such a powerful symbol and statement for protesters in Ferguson, Missouri and all over the country.

Let me say, right off the bat, how much I respect and admire the Rams players—Tavon Austin, Kenny Britt, Stedman Bailey, Jared Cook, and Chris Givens—for what they did. Like their coach Jim Fischer, I defend their right to free speech. Perhaps even more than he can or would say, I celebrate their vision and courage, with respect both to their awareness and understanding of the broader social issues involved as well as to how they figured out a way to use their status as athletes to contribute to that conversation. Their use of the hands-up pose was a stroke of symbolic genius that allowed these men, who make their living with their bodies, to speak volumes without actually saying a word. I see them in the proud tradition of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who in 1968 used the platform afforded them as Olympic champions to call attention to ongoing problems of race and racism in the United States. (Their clenched-fist, victory stand demonstration in Mexico City, the iconic image that has appeared in many media outlets over the past couple of days, is the inspiration and focus of my book Race, Culture, and the Revolt of the Black Athlete.)

But lots of people don’t see it this way. Predictably, there has been a backlash against the Rams players, led or at least crystallized by the St. Louis Police Officer’s Association who called the gesture “tasteless, offensive, and inflammatory,” calling for an apology from the players and disciplinary action from the NFL. Some of these criticisms are driven by disagreements with the players’ views and perceived politics. I’m actually okay with that (though I’m probably more on the players’ side than the critics). In fact, a real, meaningful conversation about the incident and subsequent events and larger social and racial issues in and around Ferguson that provoked this demonstration in the first place would be a very good result. Yet that doesn’t seem to be what is happening. Instead, judging by their official statement, the police group seems to continue to see black people and bodies as a threat in need of constant management, policing, and control, all of which maps onto the dynamics between the NFL and its predominantly black workforce.

At a broader level, too much of the reaction to the Rams is driven by the sense that this display was objectionable because it was somehow out of place, because it occurred in the athletic arena. This really rubs me the wrong way, and not only because I firmly believe that athletes, like anyone else, have a right to their opinion and the opportunity to express that opinion freely and publicly. I get frustrated with this response because so often the sporting world is used and/or functions to promote, celebrate, rationalize, and legitimate all kinds of social causes, religious beliefs, and political issues—nationalism, military service, breast cancer awareness, the power of prayer and faith, etc. I don’t see why some social issues are allowed pride of place in the sports arena, while others are not, how some athletic figures are allowed to speak up and even spout off, while others are consistently chastised and silenced. There are clearly double standards often at work here, especially with respect to what is seen as protest or complaint against the mainstream majority.

One of the things that is driving me crazy about my various Facebook networks and Twitter feeds is that so many of the folks who have been critical of the Rams players are the same folks who have been calling for activists, African American and otherwise, to protest peacefully, to express their frustrations about Ferguson without resorting to violence and disorder. Isn’t this exactly what these athletes were doing? As John Carlos himself told the Associated Press: “I don’t think anyone got injured or shot by [the Rams players] expressing emotions.”

This morning’s news on this football affair has been driven by the question of whether there was an apology by the Rams or not, with the police folks claiming that “regret” had been “expressed,” while the athletes have refused to back away from their actions and statements. “Did they apologize or not,” were the breathless lines spoken by television reporters as they worked their way through the conflicting hashtags and tweaks. Although I’ve spent much of my professional life thinking about sports, race, politics, and social change, this is exactly the kind of side-show I was afraid of—where talk about athletes and symbolic gestures and official demands becomes the focus of the conversation. The result is that public attention, our attention, is deflected away from the real issues—the deeper social problems of police use of force, of racial disparities in the criminal justice system, of pervasive and persistent racial inequities in contemporary America, and the ongoing scourge of racism itself—that should be the focus of the still-unfolding stories and lessons and (hopefully) reforms coming out of Ferguson. But of course these deeper social realities are precisely what protestors and demonstrators and activists are trying to remind us of and keep our attention focused upon. Even if we don’t agree with their perspectives, conclusions, or suggested solutions, we would do well to honor their effort.

What a night. What a disturbing, terrifying, disconcerting night. A questionable grand jury process. Explanations and pushback. Protests. Police, lots of police. Media everywhere. Some looting and violence. Gas and smoke. Images of burning buildings and cars—fiery images that seem to be on a continuous loop this morning, this difficult morning after. How to make sense of it all? What to say? What to do?I find myself thinking about the limits (and, indeed, pathologies) of a dispassionate—if accurate—sociological response in a moment of such historical crisis and upheaval. It doesn’t feel like enough. Necessary, but not enough.

I looked to and start with the President, President Obama, our President. The President’s words last night, in the immediate aftermath of the release of the grand jury decision, were measured, subdued, and multifaceted—begging for peace, pleading for calm and, more importantly, trying to get folks from all different sides with such divergent reactions to better understand each other. I saw our leader trying to explain why, on the one hand, we must respect the rule of law, our law enforcement agents, and the workings of the criminal justice system–as well as why, on the other hand, we need to understand, really understand, why there is so much anger and frustration and resentment from so many. It was very typical Obama—trying, cautiously and stoically, to be that voice of compassion and understanding, that bridge across racial and ideological and political lines, subtlety appealing to our common humanity, our bigger ideals, our better angels.

As a sociologist and a citizen, I found myself deeply sympathetic and aligned. In fact, it is probably the kinds of things I would have said if I had I been in the President’s shoes or on his speech writing team. Although I would have probably developed and further specified the deep and historical sources of anger and frustration—not only with respect to racial disparities and injustices within the criminal justice system at all levels, but also the legacies of segregated housing and lending polices, the realities of poverty, poor education, and unemployment, the persistence of so many stereotypes and racially charged images and rhetoric—I still would have asked for some kind of balance and some larger peace and understanding. In fact, much as Todd Beer in his SocSource/TSP post from earlier in the fall on “Teaching Ferguson,” I still believe that these deeply racialized and even racist historical forces, institutional policies, and contemporary realities—and the very different ways in which they are perceived and understood (or ignored or disavowed)—are crucial to both understanding and explaining both Ferguson the town and Ferguson the cultural firestorm. And this broader historical context and social conditions are all too often missing from media coverage, political discourse, and public understanding with their focus on the specific case in its immediacy and its concreteness. This in mind, I probably also would have also talked about the profound, deeply sociological challenge of confronting obvious, patterned, and systemic inequities of race in both the criminal justice system and the society at large without losing sight of the fact that the specifics of any given incident, event, or case are unique, may not stand in microcosm for the whole, and are probably not the appropriate focus for systemic, institutional change.Deeply racialized and even racist historical forces, institutional policies, and contemporary realities—and the very different ways in which they are perceived and understood (or ignored or disavowed)—are crucial to understanding and explaining both Ferguson the town and Ferguson the cultural firestorm.

But the problem is that all of this, at least as I was watching last night and trying to think it back through this morning, is a little too measured, a little too dispassionate. Part of this is that the whole abstract language of a multi-point, multifaceted analysis and perspective is a little bit too communitarian. That is, it is too heavy on the language of common understanding of our mutual situation when what we are really talking about is the extremely divergent reactions and response of very different and indeed radically polarized communities. There are specific sides and radically different perspectives here, and the stakes require responding to them on their own grounds. Ultimately, however, I think this response–both the President’s and my own—is unsatisfying at the moment, because it is too much about analysis and understanding, and not enough about action, response—what to do and who will lead. Too often the call for calm, clear thinking analysis and understanding—no matter how accurate, no matter how potentially useful—never gets to the next step. Good sociology, in short, does not always make meaningful leadership, much less transformative response and meaningful change.Too often the call for calm, clear thinking analysis and understanding—no matter how accurate, no matter how potentially useful—never gets to the next step. Good sociology, in short, does not always make meaningful leadership, much less transformative response and meaningful change.

Ezra Klein’s Vox column this morning (“Why Obama won’t give the Ferguson speech his supporters want”) helped give me a better sense of why Obama gave the speech he did. He is capable of more. Indeed, he did more–much more–on the campaign trail leading up to his historic ascendence to the presidency. But now, as President, he is in a different position. Obama’s challenge is not so much that he needs to try to speak to and represent the nation as a whole. Obama’s challenge right now, according to Klein, is that in our polarized political climate—and no figure is more polarizing than the President, according to the political scientists—anything Obama says on any given issue or cause, any specific position he takes or policy he argues for, tends to be damaging to the cause or any allies he may have. Obama and his advisors have—rightly, it would seem—realized that he is hemmed in and it is better for him to take a middle ground rather than inflame passions yet again. (Immigration, of course, is the exception to this, the arena where Obama and his team have decided to take the hit and fight the good fight, but that is a single and quite exceptional case at this point, as much about political position and institutional power as about rhetoric, understanding, and dialogue).

Ultimately, however, I find myself thinking not about Obama’s political challenges but about the limits and indeed pathologies of a dispassionate if accurate sociological response in a moment of such historical crisis and upheaval. Focusing on the roots and conditions as well as on the need for shared, overarching understanding just doesn’t seem like quite enough. Necessary, but not enough.

If this headline caught your eye, you need to read: “The Racist Origins of Felon Disenfranchisement,” a recent New York Times editorial by Brent Staples. It is a pointed and powerful piece by a great journalist. It also features an American Journal of Sociology article by Profs. Chris Uggen and Jeff Manza (NYU) and former Minnesota honors undergraduate, Angela Behrens.

And here we thought it was just impolite to point at others… Since the last roundup, we weathered #pointergate, talked about bodies, learned that heterosexual marriages really are getting more egalitarian, and chatted up Michael Burawoy, that pioneering public sociologist. Binge read or save for the week, all we ask is that you share. TSP is free and accessible, and we want the whole world to put on their SocGoggles!

Features:

“Troubling Bodies with Natalie Boero, C.J. Pascoe, and Abigail Saguy,” by Kyle Green. Too fat, too thin, unhealthy, brawny, boney, slutty, boyish, zaftig, and puny. Our societies have a lot to say about bodies; sociologists have a few comments of their own.

There’s Research on That!

“#pointergate, Moral Panic, and Online Protest,” by Jack Delahanty. Media goes for sensationalism and social media allows marginalized groups to have bigger voices. Somewhere in the middle, a Minneapolis police group got the “outrage” they wanted and a backlash they didn’t expect.

“Harassment Online and On the Street,” by Evan Stewart. Bullying, cat-calling, and the policing of norms and hierarchies—how discrimination and power combine in routine harassment. more...

Arlie Hochschild’s The Managed Heart was the focus of my “Great Books” graduate seminar last Friday. It is a beautifully written, painstakingly conceived, and imaginatively argued volume–one of the three books I knew for sure had to be on the syllabus as soon as this course got approved. The core of the book is Hochschild’s research of the work of flight attendants–how they are trained by the airlines to manage their emotions and those of their passengers. It is what she calls “emotional labor.” That provocative phrase signals one of Hochschild’s major contributions to the field: making emotions and feelings central to the study of social interaction and work and social life more generally. And there are other  field-shaping insights as well. For example, she makes a powerful, gendered argument about the disproportionate weight of feeling work falling to women in contemporary society. And in an audacious and under-appreciated final chapter Hochschild suggests that the quest for authenticity through purity of emotional expression and experience is a unique facet of contemporary, late modern social life.

Anyway, I was so taken with the book I began looking around for news stories or current events that would provide an excuse to blog about the book. I didn’t have to look far. I quickly stumbled onto a New York Times profile of Arturo Bejar, Facebook’s “Mr. Nice.”

Bejar is the head–Director of Engineering, appears to be his official title–of Facebook’s “Protect and Care” team, an 80 person department whose job it is to ensure that Facebook users “play nice.” A lot of their work, according to the profile, seems to be to get users to edit or retract comments that cause or appear to cause harm to other users of the site. But an even more basic and challenging part of the job is to develop techniques–questions, prompts, check-off-boxes–that allow the team to figure out whose feelings have been hurt in the first place “let people know someone had hurt their feelings.”  Teenagers, according to the story, are the care team’s focus. This is not just because they are more likely to be victims of cyber-mistreatment, but because they “sometimes lack the emotional maturity to handle negative posts.”  Researchers working with the Facebook team have helped the group find more “pathways” and “options” for “voicing their feelings” online. They are encouraged to talk about “what’s happening in a post, how they feel about it, and how sad they are.” They are also presented with text boxes with polite, pre-written responses that can be sent to friends who hurt their feelings.”

In other words, the work of Bejar’s team is all about the management of their users feelings and emotions. Talk about emotional labor and the management of feeling, and in high-tech, ultra-modern corporate environment to boot! Do you feel it? The connection that links flight attendants to Facebook, I mean?

Renee Zellweger received a ton of attention last week, not all of it wanted. The core of the story, if you haven’t been following along, is that the “work” (most insist her strikingly different new look must be the result of extensive plastic surgery) that Zellweger had done was so extensive that her fans and many others could no longer recognize the 45-year-old movie star. “She looked,” as the Washington Post quoted one fan, “different. Maybe not bad. Just not at all like herself.” Coincidentally, the reading for my “great books in sociology seminar” last week was Erving Goffman’s classic treatment of stigma.

Much of Stigma is about how people deal with various deformities and social blemishes in their daily lives (“the management of a spoiled identity” in Goffman’s dry, sardonic subtitle). That is, it’s actually not that pertinent to the Zellweger story. But there is this section about how variously famous and infamous people—actors or athletes, for example, or well-known criminals—try to disguise themselves so that they aren’t recognized in public. Goffman’s point is that publicly known and recognizable people must sometimes change their look so as not to be recognized as themselves—they must alter their appearance to transform their (public) identity and pass as someone else. Zellweger’s case, it seems to me, is kind of the inverse—she has changed her look,  the equivalent of her public self, to such an extent that she is no longer easily or entirely recognizable as the person the public knows as “Renee Zellweger.” She is, as the fan said, “not at all like herself.”

Another recent example is the actress Jennifer Grey—the young star of the original “Dirty Dancing” movie whose rhinoplasty removed her most distinctive feature. As she put it, “I went into the operating room a celebrity and came out anonymous.” Grey’s life—or at least her career—was never the same. (Though it did involve a short-lived sitcom where she played, essentially, herself: a movie star who was no longer a star because no one knew who she was anymore.) Zellweger’s new look, surgical or not, is a public identity and recognizability problem.

I say this because there have been many other, different lessons and reflections on the Zellweger story. Some have seen it as an example of plastic surgery run amok. Indeed, the Washington Post story went on to point out that there were some 11 million such procedures in 2013—which was 12% more than in 2012 and six times the number of procedures performed in 1997. Others have seen Zellweger’s refresh (she says any change in her appearance is simply due to being well-rested, happy, and no longer working crazy film schedules) as an example of our obsession with looks and appearances. There is, obviously, a role and function for these analyses and interpretations. However, I think they easily miss the issues of identity and presentation of self and interactions with others that are at stake and in play here.

A lot of times we imagine our identities—and others’—to be fairly fixed and concrete. But Goffman’s larger oeuvre is full of ideas about impression management, the presentation of self, and interaction rituals that insist that all of us construct and remake our identities each and every day in our interactions with others. Thus, we are more plastic and malleable than we often care to realize. One of Goffman’s most famous explications is a chapter called “On Face-Work.” Goffman begins, “Every person lives in a world of social encounters, involving him [or her] either in face-to-face or mediated contact with other participants. In each of these contacts, he tends to act out what is sometimes called a line—that is, a pattern of verbal and non-verbal acts by which he expresses his view of the situation and… himself.”

Goffman then introduces the notion of “face:” the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line other assume he has taken during a particular contact.” We all work to present a particular persona or “face”  that fits the notion of ourselves we are trying to project and the image others have of us in any particular instance or encounter. But this face-work doesn’t always work the way we want. Sometimes we don’t present ourselves properly in/through our faces, other times our presentations are not accepted or, as in a case of misrecognition or plastic survey, not recognized at all. It can be awkward and unsettling to be reminded of all that, whether in our own daily lives or in our mediated interactions with celebrities and public figures like Renee Zellweger.Goffman’s larger oeuvre is full of ideas about impression management, the presentation of self, and interaction rituals that insist that all of us construct and remake our identities each and every day in our interactions with others. Thus, we are more plastic and malleable than we often care to realize.

For what it is worth, Zellweger, at least in her public presentation of self, appears to be handling all of this face-work commentary and controversy quite well. As she told People, “Perhaps I look different. Who doesn’t as they get older? Ha. But I am different. I’m happy.” When Zellweger uses the term “different” the second time, I think, she is referring to a new look that better fits her own sense of self. Her look may be unsettling to her fans and the general public, but it is either the result of her happiness or something that makes her happy. These are the paradoxes and peculiarities of faces and identities in both public and private. It’s face-work in action.