The University of Minnesota’s annual Sociology Research Institute conference is a special time for all of us; in it, we celebrate our department and our discipline, providing a forum for our students, faculty, staff, and affiliates to discuss their research and debate current sociological issues. We also take the time to celebrate others who’ve done important, field-shaping work in the past year. In 2011, we were overwhelmed with the outpouring of support for the winner of our annual Public Sociology Award: Gwen Sharp and Lisa Wade, co-founders of The Society Pages’ Community Page Sociological Images.

In many ways, the type of public outreach Gwen and Lisa do with their immensely popular website is overlooked within the academy, but how many of us can claim that over half a million people see—and engage with—our work every month? I’d venture none. Gwen and Lisa, however, can not only claim, but proclaim this accomplishment. They are the embodiment of TSP’s ideal: they talk about society with society. Their site encourages both academic and non-academic readers to exercise and develop their sociological imagination by presenting brief sociological discussions of compelling and timely imagery that spans the breadth of our society. Their site is described, at least within the nominations we received, as a “relatable, interesting way to draw both students and the public into sociology” and as “vibrant and refreshing work” that lies “at the intersection of teaching and scholarship.”

Lisa Wade earned her PhD at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and is currently in the department of sociology at Occidental College in Los Angeles, CA. Gwen Sharp also earned her PhD at Madison and is at Nevada State College in Henderson, where she teaches courses in gender, race and ethnicity, sexuality, stratification, and popular culture. Both are exemplary scholars, engaged citizens, and public sociologists of the first degree. We are so proud to host Sociological Images and to honor them today with the 2012 Public Sociology Award.

Please join us—all of you!—tomorrow night (Saturday, April 21st) from 6-8pm at the Town Hall Brewery at Seven Corners in Minneapolis to meet and mingle with Gwen, Lisa, and the rest of the TSP team.

Are you interested in the NBA, myths about Asian American success, or race relations in general? If so, we’ve got two great new pieces headed your way.

The first, which just went live, is an insightful exchange between experts C.N. Le, Rosalind Chou, and Ben Carrington on the meteoric rise (and recent fall) of professional basketball player Jeremy Lin. It is the handiwork of our fabulous “knights of the roundtable” team.

Coming soon, then, will be a new TSP White Paper from Jennifer Lee called “Tiger Kids and the Success Frame” which helps explain how ethnicity matters in educational outcomes. This is the first of a fabulous two-part installment.

We are extremely excited to have these two, timely new pieces on our site, and hope that you are inspired to add your comments and thus contribute to the dialogue.

UPDATE: “Tiger Kids and the Success Frame” is now live–and it even has a Glee clip! Looking forward to our second piece from author Jennifer Lee.

Professional editing is our “secret advantage” at TSP and this secret advantage has a name: Ms. Letta Page. Without her sharp-eyed and supportive editorial work, we’d be offering far less content on these pages — and what we could provide would be much sloppier and less readable. Together with web editor Jon Smajda, she’s also responsible for much of the elegant design work and illustration you see around the site.

Associate editor Letta Page usually toils anonymously in her behind the scenes role as self-described editrix and language maven. Today, however, she’s featured in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune style section. Letta’s style and positive energy shine through in her editorial work, but she’s also got killer fashion sense. Because her contemporaries are rarely so passionate about grammar, diction, and the (retro-cool) Elements of Style, she suspects that our authors tend to picture her as “the sort of editor who wears her glasses on a chain.”

Ms. Page is also passionate about intellectual property, ensuring that we don’t appropriate the work of photographers, writers, and artists without their permission. A shortened version of the article is online, but you’ll have to purchase the newsprint version of this morning’s Strib to see the full story and images.

Our authors don’t care so much about our fashion choices, of course (which is fortunate, in light of the crimes against fashion routinely perpetrated by professors Uggen and Hartmann). But they do appreciate an editor who can simultaneously sharpen their prose and bring their ideas to full flower. Great editing, like great style, never goes out of fashion.

This past weekend I came across a piece by Pulitzer Prize winner Gareth Cook in the Boston Globe about new research showing that spending time helping others can actually make it seem like we’ve got more time for ourselves. It sounded like a great, eminently sociological project in so many ways: its emphasis on the social meaning and variable experience of time, the importance of selflessness and interacting with others, the use of interviews and experiments, and, of course, the classic, counter-intuitive conclusion that the best solution for not feeling like you have enough time is to make time for others.

My first thought was to throw it over to our Citings & Sightings team as another cool case of how sociological research finds its way to public attention in and through the mass media. But a closer look made me pause. It turns out the research was produced by a team headed up by a professor in a business school (Harvard, no less).  Scholars who teach future MBAs to make millions taking on questions of selflessness and the social experience of time? Suddenly I found myself getting cynical about the researcher’s claim that such activities give us confidence we can get things done and allows us to feel more in control of our own lives.

Lately, whether it is management professors, researchers in public health, or cultural studies critics, scholars all over the academy seem to be taking on topics and using methods and theories pioneered by sociologists. It is easy to be a bit skeptical or defensive, but rather than getting caught up in turf wars, I think it better to celebrate such insights and accomplishments as part of the structure and functioning of social life, claiming them as part of the big, broad sociological tent. It’s not important who is researching sociological questions, but that scholars of all stripes are calling attention to the importance and complexity of social life and interactions—a broad context that’s so often missing from the individualist, economistic, and biological visions of human beings and social life that are otherwise dominant in our academic culture.

Are you planning on watching the NCAA final four this weekend? Have you ever thought it unusual that we Americans put so much time and energy into college athletics? Have you ever thought about how strange it is that institutions of higher education in the United States field teams in the first place? (People from other countries and cultures sure do.) But no matter what your answers, take a look at this entertaining, little mock-advertisement featuring BYU math-letes and let us know what you think about why things are as they are (and they could be different).

Shantrelle P. Lewis’s Photos

Last spring a fascinating little story in the LA Times on the collective/behaviorial intelligence of fire ants put me in mind of the Harvard sociobiologist E.O. Wilson (“Fire Ants for Sociology”). I first heard about Wilson in high school (his paradigm-shifting book came out in 1979; I graduated in 1985), read some of his work in college, and talked about it a fair bit hanging out with biologists in graduate school, but I hadn’t thought a lot about him and his ideas since.

Wilson, I learned from a recent New Yorker piece on the genetics of altruism, hasn’t been hiding or anything. Though now over 80 years old, Wilson is still as busy as the ants (too bad, for alliterative purposes, it wasn’t bees) he’s spent his life studying. Indeed, among his numerous accomplishments of last 20 years is a massive, richly (and apparently hand-) illustrated, 800-page book on Pheidole, the “most abundant genus of ants.”

The article in the New Yorker is actually not about Wilson, though, so much as a whole debate that has taken shape within his field. It centers on natural selection and the existence of altruism and cooperation. More specifically, it is about the validity of William Hamilton’s “inclusive fitness theory,” which posited that the Darwinian concept of competitive fitness was driven not only by how many offspring an individual manages to have, but also about the reproductive capabilities of surviving relatives. At the core of the controversy is the validity and utility of the elegant mathematical formula from and upon which Hamilton derived his theory in the 1960s.

For several decades now, the equation—which which I won’t detail here—has held essentially biblical status for explaining genes and cooperation. According to the story, Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins called Hamilton “the most distinguished Darwinian since Darwin.” But a new generation of biologists are challenging the formula on mathematical grounds; they have joined forces with Wilson, whose own doubts stem from his voluminous knowledge and observations of insects. Wilson now says his embrace of Hamilton’s math was misguided: “I’m going to be blunt,” he told the New Yorker. “The equation doesn’t work. It’s a phantom measure.”

This article is a model of science reporting (and sociology of science type insight), with fascinating details about how an idea emerges and takes hold of a field, the relationship between mathematical modeling and empirical observation in the biological sciences, and the social nature of the development of scientific knowledge. The latter isn’t always pretty: the insurgents have weathered a storm of both public and private virulent criticism. It is, as reporter Jonah Lehrer nicely characterizes it, “science with existential stakes.”

Still, for my money, the Wilson parts of the story are the most compelling. Wilson, after all, is the one who helped make Hamilton’s equation famous; now he’s leading the charge against the theorem, and he seems to relish the attention and controversy. Perhaps I’m a sucker for the drama and intrigue of the renegade scholar. But at a more intellectual level, what I find appealing is Wilson’s insistence that “human generosity might have evolved as an emergent property not of the individual but of the group.”

“Group selection” is apparently dismissed by most evolutionary biologists, but Wilson believes it holds the key to understanding altruism. “Goodness,” as the article explains, “might actually be an adaptive trait, allowing more cooperative groups to outcompete their conniving cousins.” Wilson cites cases of cooperation the animal kingdom ranging from microbes to plants and female lions. “In all of these studies, many of which have been conducted in the controlled conditions of the lab, clumps of cooperators thrive and replicate, while selfish groups wither and die.”

Lehrer goes on to quote a wonderful, concise bit from a 2007 Wilson paper: “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.”

I love those first two sentences. But as profound and compelling as I find them, the third gives me pause, reminding me of the difference between the straight biological sciences and the human sciences. My sense is that in the human domain it is precisely the tension between selfishness and altruism and the choices we make between ourselves and our collective commitments—Wilson’s “commentary”—that is most interesting and uncertain (not just theoretically, but in actual social life).

In my earlier post on Wilson and his ants, I wrote that a group or collective can develop complex systems to achieve things that no individual member could have imagined or enacted. In addition, I suggested humans have a unique ability and capacity to organize, structure, and reflect upon our collective activities. Indeed, in my view, self-conscious reflection is one of humans’ real sources of power and adaptability in the natural world. As both individuals and groups, we are constantly faced with choices about if and when to be self-interested or altruist, individualistic or cooperative. These are not easily summarized by mathematical equations. Nor, for that matter, are they fully structured and determined—which is why, as biological as we are and as much as the social sciences share with the hard sciences, important differences remain regarding what the significant questions are, how we act upon them, and what is only just commentary.

If you haven’t already, I’d encourage you to take a little time and read the new TSP white paper on religion and political culture in contemporary American life.
(https://thesocietypages.org/papers/religion-and-politics/) It is by our friend and Minnesota colleague Joe Gerteis who not only writes well and thinks big, but also has that rare ability to bring classic sociological theory and research to life and real-world relevance. We are excited how Gerteis uses Max Weber’s observations about religion in America over 100 years ago to frame an explanation for some of the cultural dynamics of our current political climate. Perhaps not surprisingly for those of you who have heard or read Joe’s previous work, ideas about social solidarity, trust, and exclusion figure prominently. And just so you know, we subjected Joe’s ideas to relentless double-blind review and our esteemed readers both agreed and offered a few observations and suggestions that made the piece even better.  Suffice to say, it all fits together so seamlessly and flows so naturally you’ll may wonder why you didn’t put it all together this way yourself.

Goodmorning, dear readers! In case you haven’t noticed on our front page, a new TSP department has slipped into our site navigation bar: Changing Lenses. The first post will really tell you what we’re up to there, but the short version is that I will be teamed up with my frequent on-court foe, Wing Young Huie, to have a conversation about perspectives roughly every week. Please do check it out.

In response to the sport and politics white paper Kyle Green and I recently wrote for this site, ThickCulture writer and loyal friend of TSP Andrew Linder emailed to suggest that although Barack Obama is obviously not the first “sports president,” he may be the first “ESPN President” or “SportsCenter President.” Andrew’s point (now up on ThickCulture as a more fleshed out post—jinx!) was that, although ESPN had become a cultural fixture under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Obama represented the core network demographic in its first two decades of its existence and it seems to have been formative for him. To the extent that ESPN has transformed sporting culture, then, Obama is the first President to be fully fashioned in and through that new culture.

This seemed plausible enough—and was definitely borne out in a recent interview the President gave to the star sportswriter/reporter Bill Simmons. At least two things about the interview should be pointed out. The first is why Obama chose this particular venue and reporter: “Simmons,” as one report put it, “is revered by the under-30 crowd” and “has more than 1 million—1,642, 522 to be exact—Twitter followers.” Indeed, his “B.S. Report” podcast, on which the Obama interview originally appeared, is said to be one of the most downloaded podcasts on the web.  The second point is how this interview and exchange reveals what a great fan of sports and sports talk our President actually is.

Not only is his obsession with ESPN’s SportsCenter evident, Obama shows himself to be an extremely knowledgeable sports fan, gifted in the arts of sports talk and debate. Talking with Simmons, the President riffs on Linsanity (claiming to have been on the bandwagon early) and the joys and challenges of coaching his daughters, argues about the best NBA teams and players of all time (MJ and the Bulls figure prominently), revisits his vision for a college football playoff, and waxes poetic about his philosophies on sportsmanship and scoring in golf. Obama even brags a bit about the “solid” crossover move he threw on NBA All-Star point guard Chris Paul in a summer scrimmage. All this is to say, Obama doesn’t just talk about sports, he’s really talking sports.

Entertaining (and impressive) as I found all of this, I was even more intrigued by a follow-up Washington Post post that explained why the President would take time out of his unbelievably busy schedule to do this interview (as well as other sports related activities such as his sit-down with Matt Lauer during the Superbowl pre-game show in February or his annual NCAA/march madness picks). “Sports,” according to the WSJ, “is a universal language that can bridge ideological, cultural, and socio-economic gaps …you are much more inclined to like people who share that fandom regardless of whether you have anything else in common with them. You feel some sort of connection to them. They speak your (sports) language.”

The piece goes on to speculate that sport may be particularly a particularly important medium (and media outlet) for Obama “whose background—biracial parents, childhood in Hawaii, Harvard Law School, etc.—is somewhat unfamiliar to many of the voters he needs to convince to back him if he wants to win a second term in November.” While talking with sportswriters “isn’t going to convince on-the-fence voters that Obama is one of them,” the writer says, we shouldn’t “forget the connective power that sports holds in the world of politics.” The article concludes: “Obama’s ability to speak the language of sports is a major political plus for him.”