sociology

Friday was the final TSP Board meeting for long-time member and graduate editor Allison Nobles. Allison marked the occasion with some remarkably candid and heartfelt reflections of her time on TSP, which she generously agreed to share with our readers. Although a bit more backstage than our usual TSP fare, we offer Allison’s remarks because they are such a powerful tribute to the special group of graduate students who make TSP possible–AND because it’s more important than ever to share such moments of gratitude, grace, and togetherness with each other in the face of the COVID-19 crisis.

— TSP Editors Doug Hartmann and Chris Uggen

In the spring semester of my first year in grad school, in 2015, several of my cohort-mates joined The Society Pages (TSP). I tried to pretend not to be interested, but in reality, I was super jealous. I remember one morningI heard the TSP crew laughing from another room. It just sounded like everyone was having a great time. Plus, my cohort-mates were actually writing stuff in their first year of grad school and sharing it all over facebook — “look at this new thing I wrote!” 

I knew I had to get in there. 

Essentially, The Society Pages  is a website where grad students (and others) write stuff about sociological research — what new research is coming out, how sociology can speak to current events, and so on. But it’s much, much more than that. TSP supplies you with all sorts of intangible skills and social connections that go beyond its purpose on paper. 

For me, TSP was a community, a space where I found friendship and support, and a place where I learned I had value. Maybe that sounds harsh — but as a grad student in my early 20s, constantly struggling with imposter syndrome and trying to figure out my place in the world, I seriously needed that validation. Through my time with TSP, I learned that my writing is worth reading, that people actually want to know my opinions, that they cherish my friendship, and that they value my leadership. 

I also learned a lot about the field of sociology, about academia, and I picked up quite a few useful skills along the way. Sociology is HUGE, diverse, and I learned that mostly, I like all of it. It doesn’t have to be boring — there’s plenty of space for creativity in sociology — and it doesn’t have to be jargony or confusing for the sake of being confusing. In my time at TSP, I came to truly value public sociology and doing public sociology in a way that can be understood by people who don’t know much about it. 

Here’s another big thing I learned: my colleagues are freaking awesome. When you’re in grad school, it’s hard to get a sense of your fellow grad students’ talents, skills, and ambitions (again, see imposter syndrome). You often don’t even get to read anything they’ve written until it’s published in a journal. In TSP, you not only get to see people write stuff pretty often, you get to workshop their writing during Friday meetings, hear their creative ideas in brainstorming sessions, and listen to why they are passionate about particular research during the days we pitch discovery articles. And if you pay attention, you also learn what your colleagues are good at: you see who is great at rephrasing things other people say, who asks really detailed questions you never would have thought of, who sees the “big picture,” who can type and talk at the same time, who gives constructive yet supportive feedback, who can teach you how to do a literature search without making you feel like a kindergartener, and whose energy makes everyone else perk up. To all of my colleagues during my time at TSP, I’m so glad I got to learn about you.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that I spent nearly my whole term as grad student editor suffering some pretty serious and persistent concussion symptoms. I spend a lot of time thinking about how much more I could have done if that wasn’t the case, how much more I could have written, the new blogs I could have started, the ideas that never came to fruition. But I’m going to trust my very smart colleagues who have told me numerous times what a good job I’ve done as editor — and I know from the way they say it there isn’t an asterisk that says “even though you had a brain injury.” 

I’ve never told anyone this, but I think in some ways TSP saved me during the past two years. Sure, maybe sometimes I pushed myself too hard or tried to do more than my brain was capable of because I was editor and felt like I couldn’t take a break. But I probably would have done that no matter what. TSP gave me a supportive space to still feel productive — something I desperately needed (see definition of grad student). It also kept me connected to people. I wasn’t able to attend very many things in the department at that time or really go out and do anything (I was social distancing before it was cool). TSP was my community. I showed up every Friday for our board meeting — often wearing dark sunglasses and a floppy hat — knowing I would be greeted with smiles, hugs, and sometimes bagels. 

For all of those things and more, I say thank you.

We think of the Society Pages as a place for social scientists to connect with public issues and audiences. Sociology’s professional organization, the American Sociological Association, has a new initiative to connect sociologists to other organizations in an exciting way.

The Sociology Action Network (or SAN ) will match ASA members who are interested in volunteering their sociological expertise with not-for-profit organizations in need of technical assistance. If you or your organization are intrigued by this possibility, the project is up and running so the time is now!

SAN volunteers help organizations in many ways, including conducting needs assessments and program evaluations, reviewing technical reports, writing grants, and providing training.  In the process of helping a local organization achieve their goals, you will be helping to expand the public’s understanding of sociology and its value to society. 

Sign up here to become a SAN volunteer today. And/or learn more about the initiative by coming to the SAN workshop at the upcoming 2019 Annual Meetings in New York. (Full disclosure: Doug is on the advisory board and will be on the panel in August, and Chris was a member of the ASA council that approved the project). The more, the merrier — and the more meaningful use of your sociological knowledge and skills.

Sociologists are uniquely positioned to pull together research and provide perspective on almost any of the major problems that confront the human species today—from climate change to terrorism and war, inequality, food scarcity, human rights, criminal justice policies. Anything. You name it, there are sociologists working on it and writing about it and helping large public audiences to understand what we are up against. I’ve believed that at least since I was editor of Contexts, and probably long before that.

One example I’ve given numerous times over the past couple of years is an article Eric Klinenberg wrote for The New Yorker in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. It called attention to how unprepared most American cities are for the effects of climate change. Klinenberg’s piece was big picture and beautifully written. It also synthesized research findings from other fields (including the natural sciences) and packaged them in a way that not only made the work coherent, but really highlighted its implications for citizens and social life (for an overview from our Clippings team, click here.)

This week brings a few more wonderful examples. One comes from the most recent class of MacArthur Genius Grant recipients, Matt Desmond, a sociologist at Harvard. Writing in The New Yorker (again!—it was only about a year ago that I christened the magazine “champion of serious sociology“), Desmond helps draw our attention to the crisis in housing and evictions that is so deeply implicated in the problems of urban policy, crime, and poverty all across the country:

For decades, social scientists, journalists, and policymakers have focused on jobs, public assistance, parenting, and mass incarceration as the central problems faced by the American poor, overlooking just how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty. Not everyone living in a distressed neighborhood is associated with gang members, parole officers, employers, social workers, or pastors. But nearly everyone has a landlord.

“For many poor Americans,” he writes with authority and conviction, “eviction never ends.”

And then there’s Adia Harvey Wingfield, professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis’s reborn sociology department. Drawing on the pioneering work of Arlie Hochschild (along with Minnesota’s own Jennifer Pierce and Millsaps College’s Louwanda Evans), Wingfield writes in The Atlantic about the consequences of the emotional labor done by women in the service industry, “How Service with a Smile Takes a Toll on Women.”

Writing—and writers—like this show off many things, not least of which is the synthesizing and contextualizing ability that characterizes the discipline of sociology, that enterprise I told my intro students last night is can be called the “big tent” of the social sciences.

We sociologists tend to have a chip on our shoulder. We tend to think—not without substantial evidence, of course—that our research and ideas are not particularly visible or influential in the public realm, both in general and especially in comparison to our social science cousins. Maybe we should all be reading The New Yorker. It seems like we’ve got a few champions over there.

Exhibit A: A few weeks back, for example, the magazine ran an intriguing and insightful profile of Howie Becker. This was not a fluff piece. Inspired by Becker’s current popularity among a certain set of French sociologists in Paris (where the 86-year-old Becker now spends a great deal of his time), Adam Gopnik’s* article thoughtfully walks readers through Becker’s intellectual career and distinctive way of thinking about deviance, culture, and collective activity. This wonderfully written piece serves, I think, not only to introduce a broad, general audience of readers to one of the truly iconic (and iconoclastic) figures in sociology and his uniquely sociological worldview. More than this, it frames and situates Becker’s work in the broader history and current debates of the field in a subtle, sophisticated way that I believe proves provocative and edifying no matter how much we may already know and think about the discipline and Becker’s contributions to it. (For you insiders: Becker directs a zinger or two at Pierre Bourdieu along the way.)

Exhibit B: Last May, a review of recent books on office design by Jill Lepore was framed around a discussion of C. Wright Mills’s classic 1951 study White Collar. Although ostensibly about new studies of the new trends in office work, this review, at least in my reading, seems more fascinated with and driven by what Mills and his sociological perspective contribute to our understanding of life and work and contemporary work culture than anything written recently from more specialized scholars and fields. more...

Welcome back! Wait, many of you never went anywhere. You’ve been reading TSP all summer. You guys have been great. It was me who’s been on hiatus, buried in book writing among other things. (One of those manuscripts, on migration with Syed Ali, is done; another, my long-suffering study of midnight basketball, is close… very close.) Anyway, with the start of a new academic year, I always feel a little like Mr. Kotter.

I am excited about the year ahead. On the teaching front, I’ll be offering—for the first time—a new graduate seminar on “great books” in sociology, a course that grew out of a few posts I did wrote winter, right here on The Society Pages. In terms of the website, we’ve got a great new graduate student board shaping up and we are just about ready to unveil a facelift for TSP (we think it’s pretty sweet).

One of our goals for The Society Pages this year, both online and in our social media, is to do a better job of covering the field of sociology taken as a whole. That’s no easy task. Some of this will involve bringing in more content on topics where there is a lot of great sociological research and writing, but that hasn’t been represented well on our site to date: for example, education, health and medicine, population studies. But doing a better job of covering the field also includes bringing in types of research that are also difficult to find on the web, but needed more than ever: basic social facts, emerging demographic trends, and empirical evaluations of public policy and conventional wisdom. For reasons that aren’t too hard to figure, there’s a lot of opinion and editorializing online, but not nearly so much accumulation and reporting of social facts and useful empirical information.

As fate would have it, our local newspaper ran two big pieces on the OpinionExchange page this very morning that seem to underscore these points and goals. One was about “the situation” in Ferguson, the other about the proliferation of flawed studies—what the author calls “pop-sociology and pop-psychology” in the news and in our social media streams. The former argued the need for more information before taking stands on Mike Brown’s death and its aftermath (though it didn’t have much to say about the broader social contexts and public policies sociologists have focused on in recent weeks). The latter was about how scholars in certain fields still seem to misunderstand the difference between correlation and causation. Specifics aside, both ran under the subtitle: “We need more facts.” We here at TSP couldn’t agree more—and will do our best to help provide those in the weeks and months ahead.

—–

A few resources for the interested reader hoping for a little social science around that “Ferguson situation”:

“Reflecting on Ferguson? There’s Research on That!”

“Social Fact: The Homicide Divide.”

“Social Fact: Death—Not the Great Equalizer?”

“Explaining and Eliminating Racial Profiling.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education: “How Professors in St. Louis are Teaching the Lessons of Ferguson’s Unrest.”

The Washington Post Wonkblog: “How Decades of Criminal Records Hold Back Towns Like Ferguson.”

“The Average White American’s Social Network is 1% Black.”

“What Are Rappers Really Saying About the Police?”

“The Role of Empathy in Crime, Policing, and Justice.”

“Failing to Understand When Non-White People Distrust the Police.”

“How Targeted Deterrence Helps Police Reduce Gun Deaths.”

“Who Would You Shoot?”

“Roundtable: Social Scientists Studying Social Movements.”

“Roundtable: The Revolutions Will Not Be Globalized?”

“Reading the Camouflage: ‘You Are Now Enemy Combatants’.“

Spring break brings time for reflection. Last week during my days at home in Minnesota (where it still does not feel like spring), I spent a little time reflecting on what we’ve learned about sociology in doing The Society Pages. And in that process, I came across this line, which can be found in the “About Us” that runs in the banner on our home page: “we’re talking about society with society.”

I haven’t always been enamored with this phrase. In the past, it has read to me as a bit trite, and probably kind of functionalist. Truth be told, I’ve tried to edit it out of existence several times. But somehow—largely, I think, due to the insistence of our masterful associate editor and coordinating producer Letta Page*—it has hung around, and recently, it has begun to grow on me. Part of its emerging appeal is that I have had folks use it to introduce me and TSP at several public events recently. Clearly it works, it has appeal. It means something. Why is that? What is that?

Besides the catchy turn of phrase, I think the reason it resonates is because it stands in contrast to the usual “detached ivory tower intellectual.” It signals a vision of sociology and scholarly activity that is embedded and engaged in the worlds and with the people that it studies—or, even better, engaged and involved in the communities of which it is part and parcel.

One of the readings that has been a staple of the senior capstone sociology course I teach regularly has been a piece from Minnesota public affairs scholar Harry Boyte. The basic gist is that social scientists should not think of themselves as legislators (who come from on-high, bearing truth to the people), but  as interpreters, whose job it is to produce information and ideas that can enrich public discussion and policy. Even better, they should be part of those processes of deliberation and public policy formation. In other words,  social studies scholars should understand ourselves as part of the public, working with everyone else to refine our understandings of the worlds we all share and live in together.

This more involved, reflective orientation isn’t just about producing a more accessible and useful sociology for society (which we talk about a lot here at TSP), but actually—in its engagement with real people in the social world—a better sociological understanding of society itself. In short, it’s about creating a better sociology.

*I knew he’d come around. –Ed.

“I’ve got a bone to pick with you!”

Such was the rather awkward beginning of a recent conversation I had with a friend in the social sciences—let’s call him “Norbert”—here at the University of Minnesota. Even more disconcerting, it turned out that Norbert (who is not a sociologist by training) was talking about my Editor’s Desk post from a week or so ago, the one trying to specify the distinctive elements of the sociological imagination. It’s not that I minded being challenged—I actually thrive on the thrust and parry of intellectual discussion and debate. It was more that I didn’t see it coming. Aside from a little kerfuffle about wholism and holism, the post had circulated fairly widely and had generated a number of complementary comments and supportive emails. more...

This week, on The Editors’ Desk*, Doug Hartmann enumerated and tried to define** six elements of the sociological worldview. Elsewhere on The Society Pages, our many contributors worked to demonstrate that worldview—enjoy!

*That’s right: we all share one desk. It’s adorable. Possibly even adorkable.

**See what I did there? The man never met a conjunction he didn’t like. more...

At the beginning of this academic year, Chris and I set a goal: we wanted The Society Pages to do a better job of representing the field of sociology  as a whole. This aim is driven by our sense that the site does a great job in certain areas and specialties (race, gender, and sexuality, for example), but not so much in others. In addition, much of our content tends to be more oriented toward commentary, advocacy, and critique than the facts, empirical data, explanations, and discoveries which are so crucial to the research orientation and contributions of the field. We’ve made some great progress on these fronts, especially with building the topical beat pages (which we will unveil soon), revitalizing the Reading List, and launching the new There’s Research on That! feature. But there is still work to be done. In addition to these innovations—actually, as a supplement to them—we want to push for a renewed emphasis on developing content and material that does a better job of identifying, illustrating, and advocating for distinctly sociological approaches and perspectives to the study of human life. more...

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From Sport to Voting Rights

This week The Society Pages checked out gender stereotyping and toys, how we communicate our tone online (but really don’t want to talk on the phone), a whole collection of photoshop in the media, fatherhood and race, and we learned a thing or two from our Nordic friends. Enjoy! more...