While I’ve written and done research on atheism and black America, I’ve never put the two together. This Gawker post by Cord Jefferson (editor of Good Magazine), brought to my attention by the fabulous Letta Page, does.
I haven’t had a chance to think it all through yet, but am curious what others think, both about the basic phenomenon as well as about its broader social and theoretical implications.
And on that score, check out this Huffington Post piece on religion, in-group trust, and out-group distrust. It is by Scott Atran, who is, as my colleague and collaborator Penny Edgell says, “one of the most thoughtful scholars working at the intersection of religion and evolutionary theory.”
Everyone, including sociologist Joel Best, is a winner!
Has there ever been a culture as obsessed with competitions and awards as ours? And what better way is there to get someone’s time and attention than by giving them an award—especially if that someone is in a resource-poor, status-driven field like academia?
The obvious answers to questions like these are, at least in part, why we started our monthly TSP media awards for excellence in reporting of social scientific research and insight. We were also inspired and informed by a great friend of TSP (and recent contributor) Joel Best’s recent book Everyone’s a Winner: Life in our Congratulatory Culture (University of California Press, 2011). Well, it turns out Professor Best has just been honored with an award himself. Today he’s taking the opportunity to provide The Society Pages with an insider’s, reflexive account of the experience winning. In honor of his honor, please enjoy “Status Affluence Strikes Home” by our award-winning guest contributor, Joel Best:
A few weeks ago, I learned that I’d won a prize—a pretty big prize, actually. Each year, my university singles out one professor for his or her scholarly accomplishments, so it’s a real honor to be chosen as this year’s recipient. It’s also a bit ironic: in 2011, I published Everyone’s a Winner: Life in our Congratulatory Culture, a book about prize proliferation and status affluence. Now winning an award has taught me a bit more about prize processes.
To begin, I was struck that getting the word out is a very important part of the awarding a prize. While intelligence services may award medals in secret, at least until their spies come in from the cold, most prizes are heavily publicized. I gave an interview for the university’s website; the resulting story will be reprinted in the alumni magazine. I was asked to attend a meeting of our board of trustees, where the provost listed dozens of faculty who received honors—being chosen as fellows of learned societies, all-campus awards for outstanding teaching and advising, and so on. After he finished, the winners were asked to stand and we received a nice round of applause. My dean also asked me to participate in an all-college awards ceremony (our college has its own awards for faculty who excel in research, teaching, advising, or service). As the word got out, I received lots of congratulatory emails.
Obviously, this recognition was personally gratifying, but I wasn’t the only beneficiary. Publicizing professors who receive awards serves the campus, the college, even their departments; awards confirm that all of these entities are centers of meritorious accomplishments. Award ceremonies are moments of Durkheimian social solidarity, a reaffirmation of shared values and a claim that those values are embodied in those being recognized. Universities award and publicize lots of prizes, not just because the winners deserve recognition, but as a way of convincing everyone associated with the institution (and that certainly includes alumni who might be moved to further contribute to their alma mater) that it is worthy of their support.
When you think about it for a moment, you realize that our culture awards a colossal number of prizes. Think about all the Boy Scout merit badges, the employee-of-the-month plaques, and such; Americans must receive millions of awards each year. And, at least some of the time, there’s grumbling, such as when people don’t agree that this year’s winner should have received the Academy Award for Best Picture. When I left that board of trustees meeting, some people were muttering that the great majority of the faculty recognized—probably at least three-quarters—came from engineering or the natural sciences, while faculty in the humanities were barely mentioned.
The fact the people care about these matters, that news of prizes can make them grumpy, reminds us how little attention contemporary sociologists pay to status. Look at the index to any introductory textbook, and count the number of entries for race, class, gender, and power. Now look up status. Status has become the Cinderella of sociological concepts, ignored, dismissed, taken for granted. Now examine your college’s website, probably filled with news of the respect, honor, and other sign of status the students and faculty have received. Isn’t it at least possible that, when we ignore status, we’re missing something important?
I want to mention one other topic related to the organization of prizes. An individual has to be nominated to receive the prize I was awarded. I have a colleague who tells me that, not all that long ago, someone could submit a single letter extolling a colleague plus the individual’s vita, and that could be enough to lead to the award being given. No more. Today there is a call for nominations that includes a list of rules and deadlines. My chair and that same colleague made heroic efforts to contact all sorts of people to request supporting letters, then assembled a thick packet of these materials (I haven’t seen it, but if anyone reading this sent a letter in my behalf, thanks so much). Obviously, there can’t be a single standard of merit that ranks people who have made very different contributions; this means that a highly organized effort in a nominee’s behalf improves that person’s chances of being chosen. This also helps explain why engineers and natural scientists seem to receive so many awards; their professional associations seem to offer more opportunities to receive high-status honors, including medals, being named a fellow in a professional organization, and such. (Compare the highly selective Sociological Research Association, which carefully draws next to no attention to itself, presumably as a means of avoiding controversy in a discipline where many members are anti-elitist). The distribution of awards reflects the organization and cultures of myriad social worlds, where members may choose to celebrate one another’s accomplishments.
Obviously, I was very pleased to receive my prize. But, if the sociological lens is a useful tool for viewing the world, we shouldn’t be afraid to direct it toward ourselves, to recognize the social forces and social patterns that shape our own lives.
Joel Best is a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware. He’s the author of, among many others, Everyone’s a Winner, The Stupidity Epidemic, and Damned Lies and Statistics. Best was recently interviewed about the new edition of Social Problems on TSP’s Office Hours podcast.
Today’s New York Times has a story in the Arts section about how scholars across the American academy are engaging the Occupy Movement in their teaching, publishing, and research. Not surprisingly, sociologists—among them, Alex Vitale (Brooklyn College), Theda Skocpol (Harvard), Todd Gitlin (Columbia), Hector Cordero-Guzman (Baruch College), and Ruth Milkman (CUNY)—figure prominently in the story, which is largely about the different social scientific data and methods by which these movements and their participants are understood. Missing from this discussion, however, were the global dimensions and forces of these movements. Fortunately, TSP’s “Knights of the Roundtable” team, led by Sinan Erensu, recently interviewed a number of expert sociologists specifically with this focus. You can check it out here.
Here in Minneapolis, Earth Day and the Invisible Children campaign to “Cover the Night” clashed just a bit, as we found our own Walker Art Center’s sculpture garden damaged in the name of raising awareness about Joseph Kony and the ongoing atrocities in Uganda. For a lot of people here and elsewhere, the name Kony has certainly become more “famous” with Invisible Children’s recent efforts, but the context has been lacking. Beyond a flashy video and exhortations to do something now—even if it’s causing a lot of expensive damage to public art—many are left without any real idea of what’s happening in Uganda, how Ugandans themselves are working to solve the crisis, and how effective campaigns like Invisible Children and even the individual efforts of well-meaning Americans can really be. Our own Shannon Golden recently interviewed the U of M’s Amy Finnegan, who wrote her dissertation on Invisible Children, about these vexing questions, and now Finnegan has launched a website with other scholars in order to help give a broader view and perspective on Kony, Uganda, and activism. Dr. Finnegan writes:
In response to Kony2012, Making Sense of Kony has some excellent information to contextualize and begin further dialogue on the LRA, northern Uganda and the surrounding region, militarization in Africa, and the role of advocacy. Please check it out and pass it on!
Thanks to Dr. Finnegan for continuing the role of public sociology by taking on such a big, tangled issue and working to help us all understand it better. For those of you who are academics, you’ll also find helpful teaching resources on the new site.
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).
With my interests in race, sport, politics, and the 1968 Olympic protests, how could this powerful, timely visual composition not catch my eye? (It was sent to me by Professor Ron Greene in the Communications department here at Minnesota.) Just last Friday, my graduate students and I were talking about the social consciousness and political voice of athletes in America, and I told them that I always think of the 1968 Olympic victory stand demonstration as a preeminent example of how athletes’ most effective mode of speaking is with their bodies and through their actions. In my book, I point out that Tommie Smith (the gold medalist who was at the center of it all) didn’t comment publicly about the gesture for almost 20 years—in effect forcing everyone else moved by his actions to talk on his terms. Kudos to the Miami Heat for following in this tradition (their image seems to be everywhere right now), and to Shantrelle Lewis for calling out the parallels.
