Creating responsible spaces for learning about harm, prevention, and justice.

I have been teaching Victimology in one form or another since graduate school, and I currently
teach as an adjunct professor at the University of Bridgeport. Over the years, the classroom has
shifted in ways that are both visible and felt. Students are more willing to talk about mental
health, more open about supporting loved ones through trauma, and more honest about the
emotional weight they carry into academic spaces. At the same time, the content of Victimology
has not become any less heavy. If anything, the world students are inhabiting has made
conversations about victimization more immediate, more personal, and more difficult to
compartmentalize.

In any classroom where we discuss harm, violence, exploitation, and systemic injustice, it is
almost guaranteed that some students have been directly or indirectly affected by these
experiences. Victimization is not abstract. It is lived. It is primary, secondary, and tertiary. It
exists in personal histories, family systems, relationships, and communities. The question, then,
is not whether students bring trauma into the room. They do. The question is how we teach in
ways that acknowledge this reality without turning the classroom into a site of harm itself.
Students often enter Victimology wanting to help others, but quickly realize the material is
emotionally complex. At the intersection of criminal justice and mental health, the course
challenges them to understand trauma, resilience, and the human impact of victimization, not just
crime itself. I begin each semester by naming this tension and emphasizing that engagement does
not require personal disclosure. Through content notices, I prioritize choice, consent, and
preparation so students can approach difficult material with awareness, pace themselves, and
seek support without feeling overwhelmed or caught off guard.

Creating a “safe space” is often framed as the goal in courses that deal with trauma. I am more
interested in creating what I think of as a responsibly held space. Safety in a classroom that
studies victimization cannot mean comfort at all costs. Discomfort is part of learning. But harm
is not. The line between the two is not always obvious, and it requires constant attention. This
means establishing norms for discussion that prioritize respect, boundaries, and care. It means
interrupting harmful language when it appears, even when it is framed as debate. It means
reminding students that analyzing systems of harm within criminal justice institutions is different
from interrogating each other’s lived experiences.

One of the most difficult pedagogical balances in Victimology is the relationship between
connection and containment. I want students to connect to the material. I want them to
understand how theories of victimization intersect with real lives, real policies, and real
consequences. I want them to see how prevention strategies, trauma-informed practices, and
survivor-centered approaches can reshape institutions. But connection can slide into
overidentification, and over-identification can slide into emotional flooding. In a field where
empathy is often framed as a professional virtue, we rarely talk enough about the labor of
learning how to compartmentalize in healthy ways. I am explicit with students that part of their
professional development involves learning how to engage deeply without absorbing everything
as their own. This is not emotional numbing. It is emotional boundary-setting.

Assignments are where these tensions surface most clearly, as students often assume they must
share personal experiences to demonstrate learning. I challenge this by emphasizing that
reflection is optional, not required. Instead, I design assignments focused on applying theory to
case studies, policy, media, and institutional responses. When reflection is included, it centers on
perception and ethics, not personal disclosure. I make it clear that grades are not tied to personal
revelation, reminding students that they do not need to make their trauma visible to be taken
seriously, a message that often relieves unspoken pressure.

Classroom conversations require similar care. When discussions become emotionally charged, I
slow the pace. I name what I am noticing. I remind students that feeling something is not the
same as being obligated to share it. Silence is allowed. Stepping out is allowed. Writing instead
of speaking is allowed. These small permissions matter. They communicate that the classroom is
not a performance space for pain, but a learning space where emotional responses are
acknowledged without being extracted.

At the same time, I am aware that I am teaching in a moment when students are not only
exploring their own mental health, but often supporting partners, family members, and friends
who are struggling. The classroom does not exist in isolation from these realities. Many students
are navigating coursework in criminal justice and mental health fields while simultaneously
carrying the emotional labor of care in their personal lives. Deadlines, participation expectations,
and academic rigor still matter, but flexibility and humanity matter too. Trauma-informed
pedagogy is not about lowering standards. It is about recognizing that students are learning in
bodies and minds shaped by experiences that do not turn off when class begins.

I often reflect on the emotional labor we ask of students in Victimology, engaging with harm,
analyzing broken systems, and imagining themselves working within them. We rarely consider
what this costs them while they are still developing. As one student shared, “I care about this
field, but sometimes it feels like learning about it is hurting me.” That stays with me as a
reminder that teaching this material carries real ethical responsibility.

Teaching Victimology requires exposing students to the realities of trauma, but exposure alone is
not education. Education involves context, support, structure, and care. It involves helping
students learn how to think critically about harm without normalizing it, how to engage
emotionally without being consumed by it, and how to imagine professional roles in criminal
justice and mental health that include boundaries as well as empathy. The classroom becomes
one of the first spaces where students practice balancing advocacy with sustainability, care with
prevention, and passion with professional limits.

I do not believe it is possible to fully protect students from the emotional impact of studying
victimization, nor do I think that should be the goal. What is possible is to teach in ways that
acknowledge the psychological terrain students are navigating. We can be intentional about how
we introduce content, how we structure dialogue, how we design assignments, and how we talk
about mental health not as an aside, but as part of the learning process itself. In doing so, we
model a version of professional engagement that does not require emotional self-erasure. We
teach students that their humanity is not a liability in this field, but it does require care,
boundaries, and support.

In a moment when students are increasingly open about their mental health and increasingly
exposed to collective and personal trauma, how we talk about victimization in the classroom
matters. The classroom becomes one of the first sites where students learn not only what
victimization is, but how it intersects with criminal justice, mental health, prevention, and care.
More importantly, it becomes a space where they learn how to carry this work forward without
losing themselves in the process.

Brianna Stefano holds a Bachelor of Science in Forensic Psychology from the University of New Haven and a Master of Arts in Criminal Justice from the University of Bridgeport. She has served as an adjunct professor at the University of Bridgeport for the past three years, teaching courses in Criminology, Juvenile Delinquency, and Victimology. Her work centers on the intersection of criminal justice, psychology, and sociology, with a particular focus on the human and emotional dimensions of victimization. In addition to her academic research, she applies these frameworks to organizational settings, specializing in emotional health, psychological safety, and workplace well-being.

We try our best to be inclusive to all students. Let’s explore this LinkedIn blog post on “Curricular Barriers That Harm Neurodivergent Students of Color.”

Dr. Sarah Lageson, Associate Professor of Technology and Social Power at Northeastern University with a joint appointment in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice and Law, sat down with First Publics to reflect on her experiences in communicating public-facing methods. She shared with us her motivation for pursuing a law degree after her PhD and how the two inform her teaching, her writing for public outlets, and her time co-hosting the podcast “Give Methods a Chance.”  

First Publics: You are a sociologist but also a lawyer—what motivated you to get your JD after you were already a professor in a school of criminal justice? 

Sarah Lageson: That’s a good question. I get it a lot. You know, pragmatically, when I was an undergrad, I thought about law school and quickly dismissed it because of the cost and a knowledge gap in how one even navigates law school. So, when I decided to go to graduate school for sociology, that was after being directly exposed to research. I worked at a nonprofit in Minneapolis, and we had partnered with the University of Minnesota Sociology, and Chris Uggen was the principal investigator of this project, and I was an AmeriCorps volunteer. I got to see how sociology worked and that was so exciting. I mean, the research was really exciting. The policy changes that came from the research were exciting. So once you get firsthand experience with something, it becomes more real, as an option. The law school just wasn’t that for me. It was too amorphous, and so I put that idea away. And the great thing about sociology and sort of the breadth of topics, is that you can engage in legal analysis and legal research. And once I finished and started my job, I was lucky to get a faculty position at a place with a great public interest law school that was actually in the same building as the School of Criminal Justice. This was at Rutgers University in Newark. So finally, I had that firsthand exposure to the clinics, to the faculty, to the students. Students would sometimes take our classes; a lot of the undergrads I had would matriculate into the law school. So that’s when I decided to make the leap. So that’s the pragmatic side. 

The more intellectual or substantive side was that I was hitting a point in my research where I was studying the law and trying to understand how the law operated in people’s lives, but I didn’t have a great understanding of the substance, the procedure of law and how it actually worked. And I really wanted to figure out a way to get the research findings in front of decision-makers and policymakers, but I really didn’t understand where a policy came from and who enforced it and how you could challenge it and change it. And I think, you know, law school, for better or worse, a lot of it is about procedure, and I found it extremely useful to me in the research. And I was also doing a big research project by myself. At this point, I was interviewing all these people about criminal record expungements. And it was mostly a qualitative study. There are other components, but I was sitting in my office, doing face-to-face, pre-COVID, interviews with people, and expungement’s a tricky but relatively straightforward, simple law thing, and people just say, “Well, can you just help me fill this form, or can you just explain this part?” And part of me was, I think I could help you figure this out, but I’m not allowed to, or I’m just asking you questions, and I felt like I just kept asking them for help, and I wasn’t able to give help back. So getting to be a law student and doing the clinical work was wonderful, and I did internships, and I learned a lot. 

FP: How do you meld sociology and law together in your teaching? 

SL: At first, a lot of it is demystifying and calming fears, I think, because the last thing a law student wants to do is look at statistical output, and often the last thing my social science students want to do is look at a case brief. And I think that’s a bummer. There’s so much to learn. And I think we might look at a brief or a table now, and it makes sense, but we should remember it didn’t before we were lucky enough to go to grad school or law school. In general, what I try to do is a lot of demystifying, a lot of starting from the beginning, and some of my favorite law professors went really slow, right? They really went deep instead of focusing so much on breadth, especially at the beginning of the class. I’ve embraced that. So I think it hasn’t changed the fundamentals that we learn about how to be an effective instructor, but I think it has given me a lot more pause to reflect and try to actually live by the things that I learned about a long time ago in terms of really showing up for the students and making things interesting and useful. 

I think when you start doing multidisciplinary work,  it gives people a lot more freedom to pursue questions that they actually find interesting and to borrow from different methods. A lot of the students that I advise, as a lot of doctoral students in criminology now, do a lot of legal analysis, whether it’s an empirical legal analysis or policy analysis as part of the empirical part of their dissertation, or they can write a really nice part of their literature review, reviewing the case law. I think it’s made their work really rich and helped them be really confident and excited about being able to translate that work to different audiences. 

I think my number one piece of advice is always be mindful of the cost, right? Universities offer all sorts of different ways to, if you’re an employee of a university, go take a couple of classes, maybe that’s part of your employment contract. If there are these part-time evening programs that are increasingly available or online distance learning. Law schools have also really opened up since the pandemic in terms of the mode of delivery and the time. There are just a lot more options than ever before. So I think it’s always worth being mindful of what you hope to achieve and being practical about the time and the financial cost, but if anything, just go take a class or audit a class. Use the resources of the university. It’s there. 

FP: You’ve published in a variety of outlets, academic and otherwise. Could you talk about that process, especially about the public writing that you’ve done, and what has surprised you in engaging in that kind of writing? 

SL: Yes, it’s been great. It’s been an adventure. Each kind of experience has been quite different in terms of the outlets. The first time I ever did public writing was, it was actually for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and it was my first couple of months atmy first job at Rutgers-Newark, and my office was across from Todd Clear, which is amazing, of course. I was kind of like, complaining about this article that they published, this news article, and I thought my research really showed that. And he was like, write an op-ed. This is when you do that, and he knew that I [had] done public-facing writing throughout all of grad school with our work on Contexts and The Society Pages, but when Todd Clear kind of encourages you to do something, and he’s kind of my hero too, is very, it meant a lot, so I did it, and the paper published it. 

And I learned pretty quickly that op-eds, it depends on the place, but you kind of have control over the message or the content. And then that kind of turned into writing for more journalistic outlets. And so, that would be like Wired and Slate. And there they treat you like an academic, not a journalist. You have control over the message, but each place is a little bit different in how things are edited, and what you might submit might look a little different by the time it’s published, and you may or may not get a chance to engage on that. I placed an op-ed in the Washington Post once, and I had just not that much time to even respond to the editorial comments. It can go really fast, which isn’t always easy for an academic. And you don’t get to choose the headline or the graphics. So I have published on the harms of booking photos, only to have the stock image be put up of a famous person’s booking photo, you know? So you just have to kind of prepare yourself for that. And I think that’s no different than when you talk to a journalist. You can try to be really thoughtful about everything you say, but you have no control over what ends up in the article. 

And so, you have to sort of be prepared to lose total control over the message or parts of it or some of the framing. And then you have to be prepared for a response, and that can be wonderful. I found retired judges love to read and engage in wonderful emails, and I now have these great retired judges that come and speak in my class, and they were people that I met because they sent me a note after reading something published in the public domain. But then there are people who send very unkind messages, and it sort of depends on what the zeitgeist is outside of the work, because the things I write about are quite narrow. But if it hinges on somebody’s idea of, let’s say, like there’s a big digital privacy debate happening, it’s really not that related, but people have big feelings about it. Like you might hear from them. And you also hear from people who want help, and say, you wrote about this, and they want to know what they should do. And so you have to be prepared to either have resources available and decide if you want to insert yourself into the struggle that they’re going through or are you going to not see yourself in that role? And if so, how do you balance it against your decision to put yourself in the public domain on this issue? And I think I think all of these are fine responses, but you should be prepared to know which you’re most comfortable and well-equipped to do. 

The other thing that kind of surprised me is that I’ll hear sometimes from either a journalist or sometimes like an aide to a legislator or somebody who works at an administrative agency and government. And they’ll see something, and it coincides with an issue that they’re working on, so they’ll want to set up a meeting, and they want it. Basically, they want you to answer like every possible question about this issue, really quickly, and sometimes, you’re not prepared for that because you just kind of know about the thing that you wrote about. And I think, sometimes once your name is out there, you’ll get asked, or there’ll be, “Can you write about this?” or “Can you write about that?” There’s a tendency to start to stretch beyond your research expertise. And I just caution against that because I think the empirical research has to be this really strong foundation if you want to do this kind of public work.  You’ve got to really know the work inside and out, and you have to already have been engaging with the criticism or the limitations of the work so that you’re just kind of prepared. 

FP:  How do you incorporate your experience and your knowledge about writing for public audiences with your students? 

SL: Yeah, I mean, I really encourage students to do it well; we’re doing a lot of writing in class for obvious reasons. But like, figuring out how to write for different audiences is something I spend a lot of time on, especially with the doctoral students who—PhD students are so great these days. I mean, they come in really open to a lot of different career paths, and I love that. And so I think a lot of our graduate education now, and undergraduate education, is really about how to write for different audiences. So we write op-eds, we write policy briefs, I have the PhD students write an expert report, like they’ve been retained in a court case. I’ve had students recently kind of set, we set up a town hall debate where they represented a nonprofit, that was anti-surveillance, and other people represented the police department that wanted to buy the surveillance technology, and just sort of encouraging clarity of ideas but being very mindful of the context in which you’re communicating those ideas. We don’t formalize that often in our teaching, so I just try to sprinkle it throughout. I think it’s a little more fun, right? than just writing the one paper and being stuck in one voice. 

FP: The series that we’ve been doing has been focused on teaching methods in particular. And I know that you and our friend, Kyle Green, were previously editors of Give Methods Chance, a podcast which turned into a book, through The Society Pages. Could you talk with us about what the goals were for the podcast in terms of communicating the value of social science methods to both students and also a broader public? 

SL: Yeah, it was great. Well, Kyle has tremendous energy for teaching and for research and for everything in his life. And so, I give him a lot of credit for kind of galvanizing us around starting the podcast. The way he always framed it, and I think is right, is that you have this big project, and the methods get, like, two or three paragraphs, even though that’s, like, 90% of what we do. And then he said, if you go to a conference, you ask somebody a really kind of straightforward question about a challenging encounter or a decision they made, they light up. They become more animated because they really thought through it. And so he said, and I agree, the podcast is a great platform to capture that excitement. And we talked to people from such an array of approaches, disciplines, and topics. And Kyle and I are kind of operating in different areas of the discipline, also. So, that was great because we kind of worked from different networks. I learned about how to analyze video footage, and network analysis, and thinking differently about administrative data, and ethics of interviewing, how do you interview children? How do you interview people in this situation? So it was really great. And the book was a nice way, I think, to kind of capture that. The book was explicitly for teaching, and the idea at this point was that we just wanted to figure out a way to hit different learning styles. And I hear from people that still use the podcast in their methods class, and some students really want to listen to the whole podcast. Some students do not and they just want to read a transcript. Other students just want to read the summary, and then, of course, there’s the published article that you compare it with. So, at that point, we were kind of new professors ourselves, and we were really thinking about how we could try to get every student in their room the same information, but in all these different formats. So that was, I think, part of the goal. And then just getting into the nitty-gritty of how decisions are made. And I think what I learned in particular was that there’s both the human decision-making and the things that are driven by your interests and your training and what you know about methods and sampling and all these other things, but also the practical constraints. So, people would talk about running out of time or not having enough people to help, or grant funding is certainly animating the way that people do research now. And so, I think there’s a lot of that in there also, that I found really useful. 

FP: How do you think about research methods now?  In what ways are you still incorporating sociological approaches to research in your teaching? 

SL: I think doing sort of the public-facing work has made me, number one, a descriptive researcher. And I think that I just encourage my students when they’re picking a dissertation topic. You have to be an investigative journalist, just absolutely wanting to get to the bottom of this puzzle, and that could be purely descriptive, but you have to be that excited about it, and you have to be able to tell the whole story. And so I think we can be as narrow and technical as we want, but if you don’t have a broader sense of what’s going on here, I don’t think we’re doing a great job as social scientists. And so, I’m much more than ever, just really interested in the big picture behind the research. And I’m really interested in learning from other disciplines. I think my first faculty position was a very multidisciplinary department, and now I’m actually into different disciplines by appointment. And so, if I look at who I collaborate with now, they’re sociologists and criminologists, but they’re also economists and political scientists and lawyers and computer scientists. And so, we’ve come together because of a shared interest, problem, topic or question. But we’re bringing these really different disciplinary perspectives and tools. And so, just trying to be really open to how other places think about it. And the constraints that come along with thinking from other disciplines, I think, are really useful as well. So, I still find it exciting. I still like methods, and I can still give methods a chance. Yes!

I think public writing has changed a lot for the better. I think that there’s much less gatekeepers. Substack being a great example. And so I think it’s just a really exciting time. If you want to be engaging publicly, to get out there and do it, noting some of the potential, not risks, but unanticipated parts of it as well. But otherwise, I think teaching is our first, as you all know well, our first way of engaging with a public, and learning how to communicate as an instructor is the crucial kind of first step before you want to maybe even venture out further than that. 

It’s all about Florida: teaching systemic inequality but not sure if the course contents follow the state laws? Better check this ‘state-approved’ sanitized sociology textbook out!

What it means to learn outside schools? Try this experiential project by Alyssa Lyons in museum settings, where students examine exhibition, display, and content of museums.

Heard of the Hot Ones? It’s a YouTube interview series where celebrities are asked questions while eating spicy hot wings. You might get hungry but it’s a good place to learn semi-structured interview technique, probing, rapport building, and content analysis.

Amid attacks on higher education generally, and sociology, in particular, sociologists are feeling more pressure to show the value of their work outside the academy. First Publics, as part of our webinar series on teaching methods, provided a space of reflection on teaching sociological research methods for/as public engagement on February 23rd. With two interdisciplinary and publicly-engaged scholars, Arturo Baiocchi (Professor in the Division of Social Work at California State University, Sacramento) and Piper Sledge (Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona), we explored the role of sociological methods in community-engaged work. During the conversation, we considered the practices and politics of engaged research, explored the tensions of being “embedded” sociologists, how storytelling can enhance sociological research, and how we can get students to think about the “so what” of their work. The full conversation can be seen here; the following text focuses on some of the key themes we tackled. 

The Embedded Sociologist

Embedded sociologists sometimes work outside the professorate in policy or applied settings, while others navigate both the academy and broader publics. Both of our panelists discussed how sociological methods play a role in their work as bridge-builders between academic disciplines and community organizations. Baiocchi acknowledged the embedded positions that many of our students will find themselves in once they graduate: 

“And as the embedded sociologist, I’m trying to get them [students] to think about their work as, you know, working in the community, engaging with meso-macro issues, not necessarily micro issues… Some of them are going to be embedded within state institutions, where they’re going to be working on behalf of the state, and they’re going to be seen as policy analysts, and there, they have to walk that advocacy more implicitly, or just be aware of how they’re presenting it.” (36:35)

Baiocchi alluded to the very real tension that being an embedded sociologist can entail, navigating who we are in different contexts and to different stakeholders, as well as negotiating our role as advocates or social scientists. Baiocchi admitted that he frequently finds himself asking, “Am I an advocate, or am I a researcher?” (27:37). Further, he noted: 

“But the tension I get is, quote-unquote, being labeled an advocate. I definitely am choosing the questions we’re asking, and people know this is my orientation, I’m in the School of Social Work, I’m a sociologist.” (27:03)

In addressing this shared tension, Sledge said: 

“I do have a very strong commitment to the stories, and so I think I fully embrace being an advocate. I am always an advocate for the way of doing, seeing, hearing, perceiving, experiencing, embodying the world, when it is not the way that one is quote-unquote supposed to.” (29:51)

Storytelling and Translation 

Embedded sociologists who do community-engaged research often find themselves at the intersection where the technical meets the political. Both panelists emphasized that community-engaged research requires translation across different “cultures of evidence,” timelines, and institutional pressures. Publicly-engaged methods are partly interactional labor: translating concepts like “rigor,” “research question,” and “evidence” across disciplines and institutions. Sledge commented: 

“Essentially, the role I play across all of these different communities is that of translator. So it’s about… in some ways, I think we’re all sort of inherent methodologists, right? We’re all observing the world, taking in information, doing something with it.” (12:37)

The panelists shared a commitment to storytelling as an essential part of doing translational work. For Baiocchi, research drives storytelling and he urged us to remember “that data tells a certain story”  (25:10). Sledge emphasized that her “methodological commitments are to storytelling. So… When I say translation, what I really mean is telling stories, and telling stories in a way that people can receive.” This applies not only between academics and publics outside academia, but also across disciplinary lines. Sledge elaborated:

“The folks reviewing our grant reports and our proposals and things, they’re not sociologists. There are words that make sense to us that don’t make sense to them… And there are situations where the words are the same, but have different meanings. So there’s a lot of translation, and there’s a lot of storytelling that has to happen.” (14:51)

Baiocchi described an ongoing documentary about homeless encampments in Sacramento which he is working on with students called The Right to Exist. For him, the documentary has been a “kind of a pivot” from doing mainly quantitative estimates of homelessness to storytelling about a particular encampment in Sacramento called Camp Resolution. Baiocchi noted that there’s “the story that officially exists about this camp,” and then there’s the story that the documentary tries to tell from the perspective of people who lived there. 

The documentary focuses on a group of about 50 women who formed an encampment on a parking lot that had been designated to become a tiny home community but was abandoned by the city when its plans were deemed too expensive. The women continued to squat there and refused to leave. The city ultimately gave in to the pressure and signed a lease with the women to stay on the parking lot. Baiocchi shared his experience, 

“…when I was to find out about this, I was like, this is an amazing thing. Let’s go study it. And so … we connected with the women and we decided to hold class at the camp. We would do these field trips there, and the students would interview the women and people around the community about what was this project. And, it was really important for me for the students to get that kind of on-the-ground experience, and as social workers, they’re good at having conversations, so we leaned in as a kind of a qualitative ethnography-slash-open-ended interviews, and all the students wrote their theses basically about, you know, the experiences that these women were going through.” (38:16)

At the same time, a film crew was “kind of buzzing around the camp” but lacked access because they didn’t have relationships with the women living there. For Baiocchi, this became an opportunity to take ownership and be involved in the filmmaking process, stretching himself beyond his typical identity as an “egghead” academic. 

“I said, well, if you’re going to work with me and my students…I wanna be a co-producer of this, and we gotta do this carefully, … we’re gonna have an agreement with the women … and my students were part of that, so the filmmaking kind of ended up being a film about my class in this camp, but also about the story of this camp, as it existed.” (39:41)  

This project, he acknowledged, has pushed him into being more of an “advocate” for the community, a role that has come with certain disadvantages but also some advantages. He elaborated: 

“I was okay with that, because I feel like the conversation about homelessness in the West Coast, but also in our country more generally, has switched to something very negative and very punitive, and I am concerned about this massive criminalization of people experiencing homelessness that we’re seeing. So I thought this would be a great counter-narrative of, okay… Why are these women taking over this parking lot? And what is the city going to do? And so, we documented over a year and a half, kind of, what was going on in this parking lot…. So that’s the nice thing about being an academic, a sociologist: opportunities sometimes open themselves up, and I said, why not? Let’s try to do this.”  (40:25) 

So What? 

As embedded sociologists and the storytellers, both Baiocchi and Sledge are concerned with pushing students to see the value of sociological research beyond the academy. Being able to communicate sociological methods goes beyond considering other sociologists or scholars in the discipline, but thinking about how our interests connect to broader structures and to larger audiences. Sledge described that her teaching is driven by what she calls the two “most obnoxious but most important questions” one faces during graduate school. Namely:

“So what? And, what is this a case of? Which are really, really hard for students to cope with, I’ll say. And I hate asking them, because it feels kind of mean when somebody’s telling you about their interest and their research question, and you say, okay, so what, right? That doesn’t feel very good. But it’s in the service of making those connections that the things we’re interested in, we’re interested for a reason.” (44:14) 

By asking students the “so what” of their work, the “what is this a case of” questions, instructors challenge students to connect across various levels of sociological inquiry. In doing so, students begin to understand the role of sociological research methods by addressing the larger implications of such work. She described: 

“And [students] connect to these macro-meso-level structural things, power things.…It can be really hard to think beyond, okay, the only answer to ‘so what’ is, well, how can I influence policy, right? But when we’re thinking about public engagement, and we’re thinking about the audiences for our work, suddenly the ‘so what’ expands. It becomes much more than policy. It becomes much more than, is some other sociologist going to be interested in this. Particularly because a lot of what I do tends to be in areas that Kristin Schilt calls the not-sociology problem. You talk about your work, and people say, well, that’s neat, but it’s not sociology, right? And one of the most, important things I think I do when teaching methods to students, is helping them see that their work matters beyond the academy and beyond their personal interests, that every question we can ask, everything we’re curious about is actually connected to these more and more macro-level kinds of need to understand how the world is working, what’s our place in it, and… how might our work be picked up by someone?” (44:37)  

Baiocchi expanded on this notion of going beyond policy implications when considering the “so what.” In doing so, he further reinforced the cyclical nature of what it is to teach and consider methods, not only focusing on the doing, but also on what it means to be responsible consumers and disseminators of knowledge. He said: 

“Research, for me, is in the middle, is that, yes, you can mobilize research for advocacy or a policy, but to me, it’s understanding the limits of what you can and cannot say with research. And to me, I use this kind of framework of information literacy. What is the information out there? What does the evidence actually say about homelessness or poverty or inequality in California?” (37:47) 

We find time and time again that teaching research methods isn’t about methods alone; it’s a complicated matter regarding the political environment in which we operate (Webinar 1) and here it’s about delivering and communicating stories of the community and the people we work with to the broader audience. We, sociologists, do not only teach students methods to seek social facts, but we also teach them to be publicly-engaged scholars, embedded sociologists, and storytellers who connect the two worlds of academia and the public.

Teaching a whole semester of a Sociology class can be exhausting sometimes. To deal with the end of the semester burn-out and bring out that spark among the students, these meaningful public‑facing activities might be helpful! Check out this teaching resource: Teaching with Students as Your First Audience!

When fertility isn’t just a personal choice, try Oslawski-Lopez and Tabor’s class activity, allowing students to discussion gendered decision-making of different sex, married couples.

Zombie movies have evaded pop culture. Here is how instructors could put them in a good use! Social institutions, the issues of governance, law and order! You name it.