A stage play inspired by early boxing great Barbara Buttrick recently premiered in the United Kingdom. The play, title Mighty Atoms (after one of Buttrick’s nicknames, “The Mighty Atom of the Ring”), marks a departure in the history of women in boxing, away from condemnation towards acceptance, and has important implications for how we think about gender and […]

Raphaël Charron-Chénier, Joshua J. Fink, and Lisa A. Keister, “ Race and Consumption: Black and White Disparities in Household Spending,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2017 African Americans have long endured criticism about their spending habits. Conservative campaigns in the 1980s and 90s used stereotypical images of “gold diggers” and “welfare queens” to convince white, […]

Public housing has a long and troubled history in the United States. In recent years, the demolishing of public housing in cities like Chicago has been one of the most prominent images of decline. For sociologists, it is important to understand not just the problems with and eventual failures of post-war public housing, but also […]

The release of the video game Resident Evil 7: Biohazard represents a greater renewed interest in horror media. While horror films are the best return on investment in Hollywood, horror video games have also seen a resurgence in more recent years. The popularity of this gaming genre is explored by sociologist Margee Kerr, as she explains to The Observer: “If we were really running for […]

In this episode, I talk to University of Minnesota Professor and Editor-In-Chief of TheSocietyPages Douglas Hartmann about his book Midnight Basketball: Race, Sports, and Neoliberal Social Policy. This conversation focuses on a 1990s crime initiative, known as midnight basketball, which aimed to curb crime by setting up late night basketball leagues in inner cities. While […]