Dear readers, I shut down SocImages after the election. It didn’t feel like a time for business as usual. Sociology is not a partisan enterprise, but sociologists understand themselves to be scientists and we share a body of literature from which we derive things we believe to be more fact than fiction, at least until we have better data. Donald Trump’s candidacy made a mockery of facts, while his and Pence’s policy recommendations on everything from torture to climate change to stop-and-frisk to excluding Muslims from the US to “reformability” of sexual minorities to The Wall fly in the face of available data.

I expressed my personal feelings about Trump’s election here, arguing that we need to shift our focus away from the voting patterns of our fellow Americans and toward the institutions that suppress, exclude, and differently weigh our votes. It’s a sociological argument, but also a partisan one, so I won’t reproduce it. What I will do is go forward with Sociological Images, bringing it back to keep spreading the science of sociology, putting empirical research before presumptions as best as I can, as I and so many guest posters did during the campaign.

See you on Monday.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.