Jesse Wozniak jets off to a job interview this week, where he’ll talk about his research on state reconstruction and the new Iraqi police force. Jesse is an advisee, Contexts student board member, and frequent contributor to the Office Hours podcasts. All dissertations demand sacrifice, but this one posed particular challenges.

In fact, Jesse’s project calls to mind what Pierre Bourdieu called “the craft par exellence of the researcher:  investing a theoretical problem of far-reaching implications in an empirical object that is well constructed and controllable with the means at hand, that is, possibly, by an isolated researcher, with no funding, limited to his[her] own labor power.” Doug Hartmann loves this passage, as it simultaneously conveys both the enormity of our task and our power and capacity to get it done.

The “theoretical problem” of civilian policing and state reconstruction certainly has far-reaching implications. I couldn’t be 100% sure, though, that the “empirical object” of contemporary Iraq training academies was quite so “controllable with the means at hand.” And, despite a fine academic record, Jesse had a tough time securing funding for his ambitious dissertation plan — observations at training academies, interviews with officials, surveys and interviews with recruits in training, extensive archival research, and some very costly plane tickets and living expenses.

While he put in several grant and fellowship proposals, most reviewers and funders simply viewed the project as impossible. How could a single graduate student possibly secure human subjects approval, gain clearance from the Department of State, learn a new language, live and travel extensively in a war zone, and gain repeated access to the officials and recruits he planned to interview and survey?

Well, now he has done the impossible and returned with data in hand. When he didn’t get funding, this “isolated researcher” was undaunted – he simply took on extra teaching and all manner of additional work so that he could self-fund the project. The proof, of course, will be in the pudding that Jesse is still preparing. Having seen the materials he brought back from Iraq, however, I’m confident that the hard work and fearlessness will pay off in a terrific dissertation and book.

In some ways, we’re fortunate to work in a field where isolated researchers can still learn so much by the sweat of their brows. And while a couple years of cushy dissertation funding would have made Jesse’s life a whole lot easier, I’m guessing that something real and true has been gained in the struggle.

* The quote is from page 156 of Pierre Bourdieu’s 1988 “Program for a Sociology of Sport” in the Sociology of Sport Journal 5:153-161.
** The photo is from Ben Brears’ photostream, licensed as Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) under creative commons.

One of the core values of The Society Pages is that knowledge should be transparent, accessible, and uncensored. Proposed legislation, known as SOPA in the Senate and PIPA in the House, undermines these core values and threatens the very foundation of the Internet. Many prominent websites, such as Wikipedia, have chosen tomorrow as a day of action regarding these legislative moves.

We have decided to join in with these groups and we will present site visitors to The Society Pages with a “splash screen” or “blackout screen” for the entirety of 1/18/12. The screen will inform visitors of the implications of SOPA/PIPA and link to further reading on the subject.

Please note, our readers will still be able to click through to all of our content; they will simply be met by the black informational screen first.

We’ll be  getting the word out on Twitter and Facebook, but we’d appreciate it if you’d do the same. This will both raise awareness of the issue and prevent (we hope) any panic on the
part of our loyal readers when they see a drastically different screen when they first visit a TSP page tomorrow.

Thanks—in advance—for your support. You all mean the world to us, and we think this is the right course of action for our site as a whole.

All the best from our whole team,

The Society Pages

One of the new features of our new and improved TSP site is “The Reading List.” Essential links to new and classic social science research, The Reading List should be a resource to inform your reading of the news, research in the field, and showing off at fancy cocktail parties (or on Twitter). It’ll feature short blurbs on research we believe to be timely, relevant, and interesting, and include classic books and articles, original new research in the field, and other exemplary studies on topics and stories in the current media and debate. The goal is to be kind of a screening service and gate keeper for students, the media, and the public at large for social scientific research and writing that is provocative, informative, and relevant.

The first official installments are a couple of pieces from Aldon Morris that remind us of the origins and impacts of the civil rights movement in honor of MLK day.

We hope you like it and will let us know if you’ve got ideas or suggestions to help build the list. Our goal is to supply new ideas every two or three days—which might not sound like a lot, but there are so many topics out there and so much great social science to choose from. As we move into tagging these, you should find a simple way to pull a reading list on a specific topic, too (a little something for those educators out there).

Here’s to an exciting set of changes, with more to come!

Edited to add: Chris and I talk through some of these changes—The Reading List and more—in a new podcast over on Office Hours. Hope you’ll take a listen!

Criminologists Al Blumstein and Kiminori Nakamura offer a powerful New York Times op-ed this week, arguing that “stale criminal records” should expire when they can no longer distinguish criminals from non-criminals.

But this isn’t just a couple of bleeding heart academics advocating on behalf of a stigmatized group—there’s a solid research foundation supporting the argument. Several smart and creative studies have now followed people arrested or convicted of crimes to watch how long it takes before a criminal’s risk of a new offense drops to the point that it is indistinguishable from those with no record of past crimes.

Several teams of social scientists have designed really elegant studies to answer this important question. Most use some variant of event history or survival analysis—a semi-fancy but straightforward set of statistical tools. Based on their own research, Blumstein and Nakamura now conservatively estimate the “redemption time” at 10 to 13 years. Megan Kurlychek, Bobby Brame, and Shawn Bushway came up with about a 6-year window using somewhat different data and methodology in 2006.

While the specific “time-to-no-crime” varies across studies, the best evidence is now calling into question standard “lifetime” bans on employment, voting, and other rights and privileges. This doesn’t mean that the laws will be changed or even that they should be changed. But it does show how good social science can challenge old assumptions and inject much-needed evidence into public debates. And, for those of us who like to put our semi-fancy statistics to good purpose, the op-ed and the research beneath it offer a fine example of public scholarship.

Having spent much of the last week of 2011 out of town and away from my usual, everyday routine provided me prime time to ponder and reflect on things I often otherwise forget about or take for granted. In this unencumbered mindset, I happened upon the following line in a New Yorker piece by James Wood: “At present, the American magazine essay, both the long feature piece and the critical essay, is flourishing, in unlikely circumstances.” The comment caught my eye because it crystallized something I have kind of been thinking myself in recent years (though I didn’t have the audacity or reading range to actually say so).

Folded into a review of a recent collection by the writer John Jeremiah Sullivan,Wood’s central theme is to explore how a new generation of essayists and reporters employs the conventions of fiction writing honed in and usually reserved for “literature.” Indeed, the piece can be read as much as a commentary on the limits of contemporary fiction as of the creative applications of the journalistic, non-fiction essayist.  (Wood enlists Milan Kundera and others to develop the point.)

My thinking actually goes in the opposite direction.  I am more interested in the parallels and overlaps of the magazine essay with social scientific writing and analysis, especially in its more ethnographic and interpretive forms. I am interested, in other words, in the lessons and applications and provocations of great magazine writing and reporting for those of us working with the methods, conventions, and expectations of social science.

Three points that Wood makes about Sullivan’s representative body of work shaped my reflections. The third, on which Woods spends the most time, is about the nature of reality in contemporary life. (The piece is titled: “Reality Effects.”) Sullivan develops the theme in dialogue with David Foster Wallace’s “lost in the fun house” framing most directly and extensively in context of an extended treatment of the television series “The Real World,” the essay with which I was most familiar.  This is a deep and important theme—and has significance and consequence well beyond my end-of-year speculations. But my basic thought was this: we sociologists are both well positioned and absolutely obligated to make a contribution here (especially in connection with our notions of identity and authenticity). Still, we have only done so sporadically and in pockets since the founding of the discipline.

Nonetheless, it was actually the other two aspects of Sullivan’s writing, as rendered by Wood, that really set my mind ranging: his attention to detail and his serious, non-ironic engagement with the subject (and subjects) of religious belief and practice.

The Society Pages’ wondrous Monte Bute (that’s him, above, flashing the peace sign to the police) was picked by one MPR reporter as his favorite story/interview of the year, and so the reporter has published a quick update from the land-of-Bute: http://oncampus.mpr.org/2011/12/checking-in-with-monte-bute/

If you want to get a little more backstory on this “Backstage Sociologist,” you can check out his TSP blog, his exchange in our last U of M issue of Contexts, or get really modern and just Google him!

Happy new year!

In her forthcoming Indiana University Press book Pink & Blue: Telling the Girls from the Boys in America, American studies scholar Jo B. Paoletti explores how it is that we’ve ended up with a blue section and a pink section in virtually every kids’ store in the U.S. An April 2011 Smithsonian Magazine article gives a primer on this color-coded development, Paoletti’s research, and gender socialization, including the intriguing paragraph:

For example, a June 1918 article from the trade publication Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Other sources said blue was flattering for blonds, pink for brunettes; or blue was for blue-eyed babies, pink for brown-eyed babies, according to Paoletti. [emphasis added]

“Today’s color dictate,” the Smithsonian reporter writes, “wasn’t established until the 1940s as a result of American’s preferences as interpreted by manufacturers and retailers.’It could have gone the other way,’ Paoletti says.”

To read more about Paoletti and her research (including new work on how older women communicate through their dress), check out her website here.

And as a kicker, here’s a little girl who’s really not ready to accept the pink-and-blue paradigm:

Sometimes, when we were editing Contexts, Chris and I would set out to try to arrange an issue around a given theme. More often, though, we simply found that, as the issue started to come together, it also started to coalesce around a topic or two and take on a life of its own. That would be how we found ourselves thinking of the issues as “Oh, you know, The Aging Issue,” or “The Problems Issue,” or, well, “The Sexy-times Issue.” As it turns out, that’s starting to happen on The Society Pages, too.

Right now, it’s religion that’s caught our eye. As I got ready to post an aside here on the incredibly interesting Huffington Post piece “If Tim Tebow Were Muslim, Would America Still Love Him?” by the clearly poetic environmental policy consultant Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, it dawned on me that, just this morning, our own wunderkind Alex Casey had just put up a Citings & Sightings post on an in-depth Salt Lake Tribune article about new research on the gender gap among Utah’s Mormons and why some other social scientists are arguing with the conclusions (though not the data). And of course, last week, I’d written about my own work and new Canadian research on Americans’ lack of trust in the Atheists among us. All of a sudden, religion was becoming a mini-theme here on The Society Pages.

And no wonder: religion’s hard to talk about, but often on our minds. For many, it’s the grounding of their every day, of the ways they try to move in society, and so understanding–or attempting to understand–others’ religions is both essential and tricky. Questioning their faith or the dogmas of their faith is, in many ways, questioning another’s place in the broader society. It seems to me that these sorts of “diversions” are what The Society Pages is all about.

I’m always impressed with teachers who blend established knowledge with shifting social currents, bringing it together in ways that students can understand and appreciate. My pubcrim colleague Michelle Inderbitzin seems to do this every year in her classes at both Oregon State University and Oregon State Penitentiary.

This fall, her Inside-Out Prison Exchange students combined a social fact (that 1 of every 100 American adults is incarcerated) with a new social movement (the We are the 99 Percent cry of the Occupy movement) , photographing prisoners and the people around them holding signs that shared their stories. The result is We are the 1 in 100, a class project and tumblr site that shows an important side of the American incarceration story.

 As a professor who works and teaches in this area, I rarely come across materials that render the lived everyday reality of prisons in such a clear, human, and intimate way. You can read Michelle’s account on pubcrim or visit and add to the archive with your own photos and stories. It takes courage and trust — and an impressive amount of  work, in a 10-week class — to bring these private moments and messages to light.