sociology

New and Noteworthy

New board member Caroline Garland wrote her first piece (!), writing up research from Benjamin Karney and colleagues showing that slightly raising the minimum wage decreases both divorce and marriage rates in cities.

Worth a Read (Sociologically Speaking)

Check out this piece in partner Berkeley Journal of Sociology’s relaunch issue from Santiago J. Molina on “Biological Citizenship and Surveillance in the COVID-19 Pandemic.”

From the Archives

With Liz Truss resigning (outlasted by a head of lettuce) check out this piece from partner Sociological Images connecting Theresa May’s 2015 rise to prime ministership to the “glass cliff” for women leaders promoted in times of crisis.

Citings & Sightings

NPR and the LA Times spoke with Nancy Wang Yuen ahead of the Anna May Wong quarter release next Monday. Wong will be the first Asian American featured on U.S. currency.

More from our Partner and Community Pages

Meyer Weinshel writes for Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies’ blog on Art in the Public: Voice to Vision at the Solidarity Street Gallery

Council on Contemporary Families‘ blog reposted Barbara Risman‘s piece on how Life in Post-Roe America forces new understandings of sex and pleasure.

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TSP Edited Volumes

New and Noteworthy

Chantal A. Hailey wrote about results from her experimental study that show that that high students express different race-based preferences for schools than their parents

Worth a (Look), Sociologically Speaking

TSP partner Berkeley Journal of Sociology published a photo-essay on the process of producing the documentary film “Una Escuela llamada América,” that explores the relationship between production of the documentary and social research as well as how visual narratives can serve public debates

Backstage with TSP

This week we’re starting off a new round of pitches for the semester, returning board members summarize new sociological articles they think would make good Discoveries for the site. This year, we’re focusing on making sure we have good coverage of the generalist journals in sociology. It can be tempting for graduate students to only pitch articles from their sub-areas but we think this broader focus will help us connect back to the big vision of the field, something that is at the heart of TSP

From the Archives

In the aftermath of Hurricane Fiona hitting Puerto Rico, read this roundup of research from us on “Not So Natural Disasters”

Citings & Sightings

NPR’s “On the Media” spoke with John Thompson about how technology has changed the book industry, paving the way for Amazon’s global dominance

More from Our Partner & Community Pages

Andrew Guest wrote for Engaging Sports on Thinking Fandom: When (and How) to Watch Games We Love and Hate

New and Noteworthy

Council on Contemporary Families’ blog posted a research report from Debra Umberson and Rachel Donnelly that finds that black and hispanic parents are more likely to experience a child’s death in their lifetime and the psychological distress that comes with it.

Citings and Sightings

A new piece in the Atlantic on the relationship between debates on policing and political fights over gun control featured context and perspective from sociologist Jennifer Carlson, author of Policing the Second Amendment.

From the Archives

We’ve got a pride month pairing. Read Sarah Catherine Billups’ rounding up research on queer life in the country alongside Tony Silva’s feature at Council on Contemporary Families on sexual flexibility among rural men who have sex with men.

More from our Partners and Community Pages

Psychologist Tina Pittman Wagers from for Girl w/ Pen! wrote about what research actually shows us about the link between mental illness and gun violence and how the data should inform policy makers.

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TSP Edited Volumes

Worth a Read (Sociologically Speaking)

For Mother’s Day we rounded up some of our best pieces over the years on the challenges of motherhood plus a few additional good reads on motherhood we haven’t covered.

New and Noteworthy

Board member Isabel Arriagada created this short and engaging video highlighting new research from John Leverso and Chris Hess on how gang members’ conceptions of ideal manhood changes as they age.

Citings and Sightings

Over at the Conversation, Matt Williams interviewed sociologists Amanda Jean Stevenson and Constance Shehan on how their research provides historical context and clarifies the health risks involved if the Supreme Court does overturn Roe v. Wade.

From the #TSPClassics Collection

During this big news week, we have some TSP and partner pieces that provide social science context for the current political moment.

• Allison Nobles on the people that fought to provide abortions before Roe v. Wade
• Ilana Horwitz, Kaylee Matheny, and Natalie Milan writing for Contexts on how more abortion restrictions might lead to women dropping out of college
• Allison Nobles and Amber Joy Powell wrote for us on the connection between race and reproductive control.

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New and Noteworthy

Board member Jacob Otis wrote up research from Kate Watson and her colleagues on the challenges school social workers faced during covid-19 pandemic to meet student’s basic needs, emphasizing that the importance of schools extends beyond academics.

Citings and Sightings

Axios covered the latest data drop from the Shift Project, led by sociologists Daniel Schneider and Kristen Harknett, highlighting that most hourly workers at big chains make less than $15 an hour and 80% of low wage workers that qualify for free services still pay fees for tax prep.

Worth a Read, Sociologically Speaking

Council on Contemporary Families’ blog reposted a piece from Ranita Ray on her research about the harassment Black, Latinx, Asian, and recent immigrant girls face in school classrooms.

More from our Partner and Community Pages

Council on Contemporary Families’ blog re-posted Joseph Coleman’s piece When Therapists Encourage Family Cutoffs

Henning Schroeder wrote on the entwining of war and family lore through the lens of a twice-glazed Easter bunny for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies’ blog.

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TSP Edited Volumes

New and Noteworthy

Jean Marie Maier wrote up new research from Vincent Roscigno, Jill Yavorsky, and Natasha Quadlin showing that women experience less dignity at work despite reporting similar levels of job satisfaction as men.

Citings and Sightings

Julie Beck interviewed two friendship researchers, sociologist Rebecca Adams and psychologist Rosemary Blieszner, on how their decades-long friendship and their research inform one another for the Atlantic’s column “The Friendship Files.”

Worth a Read (Sociologically Speaking)

Council on Contemporary Families’ blog reposted a piece from Kendra Hutchens on her research on crisis pregnancy centers and how centers organize their work around “ministry,” seeking to avoid framing their activities as manipulating vulnerable pregnant people.

Backstage with TSP

Last week friend of the site and colleague Dr. David Knoke joined us for a discussion of his course “Social Science Fiction.” We discussed the potential for works of fiction to offer insight into social problems and help us forecast the future. We also thought about how reading literature such as science fiction might help students develop a sociological imagination and the ability to think beyond the current status quo. Although we work in non-fiction at TSP, it’s always helpful to think and read widely and this conversation certainly sparked thought!

More from Our Partner and Community Pages

Sheer Ganor reviewed Minneapolis Institute of Art’s exhibit “Envisioning Evil: “The Nazi Drawings” by Mauricio Lasansky” for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies’ blog.

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TSP Edited Volumes

New and Noteworthy

Board member Mason Jones wrote up research from John Leverso and Chris Hess on how Chicago gang members’ relationship to masculinity changes as they age.

Worth a Read (Sociologically Speaking)

Jamie L. Small wrote for the Conversation on her research about boys, sexual assault, and sports. She found that communities and perpetrators struggled to grasp the severity of the sexual assaults, particularly as it threatened the presumed heterosexuality of those involved as well as the community’s reputation.

Backstage with TSP

Last week we continued our exploration of social science writing with a guest: Dr. Michael Walker. Dr. Walker’s new book, Indefinite: Doing Time in Jail, uses different narrative voices, rich description, and emotion to help the reader understand the rhythms and patterns of life in jail. We spoke with Dr. Walker about how to use field notes in the process of writing, finding supportive readers for works-in-progress, and navigating credibility and vulnerability when writing ethnography. We enjoyed having Dr. Walker in and his visit left us thinking about how to incorporate coverage of long-form qualitative writing on the site. If you have ideas, let us know at tsp@contexts.org!

More from Our Partner and Community Pages

Eliza Brown wrote about the “chore” of having sex to conceive and the gendered labor involved for women for Council on Contemporary Families’ blog.

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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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The article “Community-Engaged Research: What It Is and Why It Matters” appears in the Winter 2022 issue of Footnotes published by the American Sociological Association

At least since the movement emerged in the early 2000s, I’ve been a proponent and practitioner of all things public sociology. I edited Contexts magazine from 2008 to 2011 with Chris Uggen, fellow sociology professor at the University of Minnesota, and together we built The Society Pages.org, host of the largest collection of sociology websites on the internet. I helped create a senior capstone course based on service-learning placements for undergraduate majors in sociology at Minnesota. I’ve written op-eds and collaborated with various advocates and organizations, policy initiatives, and media projects. When I was president of the Midwest Sociological Society in 2016, I chose the theme “Sociology and its Publics: The Next Generation” for meetings. But in recent years, the public-facing sociology I’ve found most intriguing and significant is community-engaged research (CER).

I learned most of what I know about CER while helping launch the American Sociological Association’s Sociology Action Network (SAN) and serving on its Advisory Board over the past few years. SAN is the initiative created by Council to help sociologists interested in community-based, pro bono work get connected with small, nonprofit organizations, agencies, projects, and initiatives looking for services, assistance, and support from professional sociologists. The driving idea was that large numbers of academic sociologists who have both the skills and the passion to contribute to concrete, on-the-ground efforts to address social problems and issues don’t always know how to get connected with appropriate organizations and groups, even those in their own communities who could benefit from their energy and expertise. It was almost like we needed a matchmaking service—a sociological Tinder—to help sociologists and organizations find each other. Indeed, one of SAN’s first projects was the creation of this service—thus, the “network” in our title.

In addition to our professional matchmaking work, SAN hosted special sessions at ASA’s Annual Meetings; worked to find and promote links and resources for community-based collaborations; and, thanks to the hard work of Carol Glasser of Minnesota State-Mankato, created an online resource page with links to webinars, best practices, and sample documents for those interested in doing this work. SAN also became the review panel for ASA’s long-standing Community Actions Research Initiative (CARI) grant program, which provides funding for sociologists who are collaborating with community organizations to address social problems.

I have learned a lot in the process. One of those lessons was about how many different organizations, programs, and community leaders dedicated to social problem-solving are out there in the world right now, and how much they need our assistance. Another was how difficult it is for a national professional organization to facilitate networking, connections, and the exchange of information at various local and regional levels. But much of what I’ve learned—from the sociologists I’ve met and worked with on and through my role on the SAN Advisory Board—is about community-engaged research itself, as a distinctive approach to research, knowledge-creation, and public engagement—what it is; who does it and how committed and skilled they are; and why it is such an important part of our discipline, its legacies, and its traditions. That’s what I’d like to share briefly with you here.

Definitions

Let me begin with the usual proviso that what we call “community-engaged research” can be defined in many different ways and often goes by several different names—community-based scholarship; participatory action research; research-practice partnerships; or collaborative social justice research. Some see it as a branch of applied sociology, others as its own distinct thing. But whatever we call it, this approach to research and sociology refers to initiatives that involve some kind of mutually beneficial collaboration among academic researchers and folks from outside of the academy who are collecting data, offering programs, or creating services that speak to the needs of specific communities and target populations on the ground.

The nature of these relationships and the kinds of contributions sociologists make to these collaborative projects vary widely. Engagement can range from consultation on vision and mission to data collection and needs-assessment using surveys, interviews, or focus groups. It can include advising on program design and policy development as well as conducting program evaluations and assessments. It also often involves some type of public or legislative advocacy or public communication (via op-eds, position papers, or formal reports). Community-based work spans the gamut of sociological methods and subfields, and can refer to policies, programs, and initiatives that are local and issue-specific, as well as those that are broader and more encompassing. Many sociologists who do this work operate at multiple levels and across a range of areas all at once.

Since I came to understand community-engaged scholarship in the context of public sociology, I find it useful to clarify the distinctions between the two as well. Public sociology, or publicly engaged sociology as I prefer to call it, refers to any sociological research, writing, and work happening outside of the academy. Among the characteristics and principles that distinguish community-based sociology from other forms of public scholarship are that it is oriented not only to the dissemination and application of general knowledge, but also to the construction of new knowledge, ideas, and approaches. In addition, the principles of relationship-building, reciprocity, and responsibility are far more “up front” and indeed imperative in this collaborative work than other, more standard forms of public engagement. And finally, community-based work can involve advocacy, but is not actually, or even necessarily, normative. Indeed, oftentimes participatory action research involves surprisingly basic and conventional social theories, data, and methodological approaches, albeit applied and adapted to unique cases and local contexts that help develop or improve programs that can make a difference in the lives of individuals and communities.

For what it is worth, the conception of public sociology that I have employed here is a bit broader than Michael Burawoy’s original definitions (Hartmann 2017) in that it includes sociology that employs instrumental as well as reflexive (or critical) knowledge—that is, it can be policy oriented or advocacy centered, or even both. The key thing for me is not what kind of sociological research and knowledge we are talking about, and not whether its politics are oriented toward reform or more radical change, or something else—only that we are talking about any and all sociology that happens outside of the academy, which is precisely what makes community-engaged research, with all of its various manifestations and forms, so compelling.

Significance

So, why should we care about this unique branch or brand of sociology? Why should those of us who don’t do community-based research ourselves be interested in any of this? There are many reasons that come to mind, and intellectual and scholarly benefits are at the top of my list.

Sociology is a discipline in need of constant reinvention and renewal. Working with concrete, community-based initiatives, organizations, and advocates provides academic sociologists with opportunities to put our theories and methods to the test—to assess how they vary in different contexts and conditions, to observe new developments in the world, and to identify underlying mechanisms and multiple modes of understanding and engaging the world. Community-engaged work helps us understand the applications and implications of our knowledge, and even develop new knowledge and theories about the social world. Even more, community-engaged work provides real-world, empirical cases from which to reflect seriously on some of the biggest and most fundamental questions of the discipline and on knowledge construction more generally: How is knowledge produced? Who produces it? How is it used? And who benefits—or doesn’t?

Community-engaged research requires us to grapple with these matters of epistemology and ontology. It forces us into needed reflection on the complexities of objectivity, positionality, and reflexivity, the constructedness of science, and the contextuality and utility of knowledge. Research that is fundamentally embedded in, and engaged with, communities also helps us to see how sociology can be complicit with power and privilege, as well as a source of social progress and change.

Framed as such, it is important to emphasize how many of the time-honored, ivory tower assumptions and conceits about our own work—our status as intellectuals and researchers and our role in the world—can be turned on their head by community-engaged research. In collaborating and coordinating with others, we realize that much of the work is not so much what we have to give (or “dole out”) to them, but rather how much we don’t know—that is, how much we sociologists have to learn from those doing the work of society right there on the ground, every day, without fanfare, recognition, or great reward.

There are practical and professional considerations here as well. CER is especially attractive to many graduate students in our discipline. For some sociology graduate students, community-based research provides a way to get started on research that can be personally rewarding, as well as lead to theses, dissertations, or other, longer-term projects. For others, it provides numerous and immediate opportunities for making good on their visions of using sociological theory and research to help solve social problems or address injustices—the very reasons many came to our field in the first place. Still other graduate students, when faced with the uncertainties of the job market and the changing nature of work in higher education, simply see better, more meaningful professional prospects in this work than elsewhere.

And it isn’t just graduate students. A large and increasingly diverse number of scholars in our field also care about this kind of work and do it regularly, even primarily. These are our colleagues, classmates, and students, our friends, and potential collaborators and coauthors. And there are more community-based researchers than those of us at elite doctoral universities with very high research activity may realize. This was one lesson I learned and a dominant theme during my time in the leadership at the Midwest Sociological Society. Action-oriented, community-based research was perhaps the most common and most meaningful kind of scholarship in which many of my colleagues at regional universities, liberal arts institutions, and community colleges were engaged. These are academic sociologists who do a lot of teaching yet are also committed to both scholarly research and giving back to their communities. In a world where time and energy are limited, community-engaged work provides an avenue to make good on all the goals, demands, and rewards of being an academic—organically and simultaneously.

Many questions about community-engaged sociology remain ahead:

• What resources or support should ASA be developing and providing to our members interested in doing community-based work?
• Do we need new outlets or venues, or even a journal, to better support, promote, and coordinate this work and sociologists doing this kind of work—and ultimately to bring that work closer to the center of the discipline?
• What kinds of course work and resources are necessary to train graduate students to do this work?
• How do we properly recognize and reward this work in our discipline and in the academy more generally when it comes to things like hiring, tenure and promotion, and merit?

Some of these questions will be addressed by other articles in this issue of Footnotes; others will remain unanswered for now. But there is no doubt in my mind that how we answer these questions—and the extent to which we support and facilitate and understand community-based research—is a crucial task for our discipline and its future.