A #Thick Year for Tressie McMillan Cottom

Amy August and Mi'Chael Wright on December 5, 2019
Tressie Mc Millan Cottom displays her essay collection Thick, which was nominated as a National Book Award Finalist. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

In addition to being a formidable sociologist of technology and education, Tressie McMillan Cottom is an upender extraordinaire of class, race, and gender hierarchies throughout academia and the broader social world. Her book, Thick, was recently nominated as a National Book Award Finalist. With over 100 thousand followers, she is the center of gravity of an ever-expanding Twitter community, and also writes an extremely influential blog. Moreover, she has created a new program of study–Digital Sociology–at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she teaches as an Associate Professor in the Sociology Department.

Even before making her mark in the sociology of higher education with her book, Lower ed: The troubling rise of for-profit colleges in the new economy, McMillan Cottom had become an expert at using social media to assert and establish her legitimacy among scholars. As a graduate student she posted a critical analysis of arguments made by a more senior scholar on her blog, and this earned her the support of a wide and diverse readership. She carries on this tradition of bringing voice and legitimacy to Black women in Thick. Through her essays, McMillan Cottom centers the Black women’s intellectual tradition and their experiences while asking readers to get comfortable with some of the most uncomfortable topics: misogynoir, child loss, sexual violence, to name a few. Her powerful blend of sociology and poignant, personal stories give voice and representation to so many, in a space where such stories so often go unheard.
On Twitter, McMillan Cottom has also created a conversation space where thousands of followers feel supported as they navigate intersecting identities which are oftentimes complicated offline. This virtual space has also become a novel topic for scholarly research. Known as Black Cyberfeminism, this research explores how identities are created and interpreted in virtual places. It also critically examines the intersectional oppressions faced by Black women in virtual institutions. As Cottom argues, Black Cyberfeminist Theory provides a new lens for understanding and engaging in conversations around sociological phenomena.
Working with the Virginia Commonwealth University Sociology Department, Tressie McMillan Cottom has developed undergraduate and graduate Programs in Digital Sociology. Digital Sociology focuses on the use of social media as part of everyday life and the ways it contributes to patterns of human behavior, social relationships, and concepts of the self. Her curriculum encourages students to apply sociological theory to analyze data produced by online human activity, including endless timelines and trends offered from various digital technologies and platforms.

Precarious Work in the Gig Economy

Jean Marie Maier on December 2, 2019
A gig economy worker checks the Uber app for an update about the next passenger. Photo by freestocks.org via Flickr.

Earlier this month, workers at the grocery delivery service Instacart organized a three-day strike over changes in the company’s tipping policy. Instacart has also been in the news this year for a controversial policy that included delivery tips as part of guaranteed worker pay, which they later said they would change. After the strike, Instacart eliminated a bonus for successful deliveries through the app. 

Instacart is just one example of worker resistance in the modern gig economy. Company platforms such as Instacart, Uber, and the transcription service rev.com ostensibly provide greater flexibility to workers, yet all are facing a wave of worker discontent over employment conditions and compensation. Work is changing, and becoming more “precarious.” Sociologists identify precarious work as “uncertain, unstable, and insecure.” Additionally, workers have little legal protection and bear much of the risk that employers previously bore.
Computer applications or apps organize and host a lot of gig work. But workers are finding that “algorithmic control” reproduces the same power dynamics as having an in-person supervisor. In particular, workers often do not know how they will be judged and rules and compensation policies may be rewritten with little or no notice. Rather than allowing workers to choose when and how they work, apps control the actions they must take to get jobs, such as maintaining minimum hours. 
For the most recent work on the gig economy see this 2018 book by Alexandrea Ravenelle. Ravenelle interviewed 80 participants of the gig economy, including those who have found success in the gig economy, those struggling to make ends meet, and those using the gig economy to supplement other income. 

Virginity as a Social Construction

Allison Nobles and Amber Joy Powell on November 26, 2019
Research shows that by age 18, 65% of people in the US have had sexual intercourse. Graph via Guttmacher Institute.

Recently, the American rapper T.I. acknowledged that he attends gynecological examinations with his daughter to “check her hymen is still intact.” While shocking to many, T.I.’s boasting and the public debates it has provoked reveal deeply rooted cultural norms and beliefs about  virginity that young women encounter on a daily basis. Sociological research provides a closer look at how virginity is both socially constructed and discriminatory against girls and women.

People understand virginity and its subsequent “loss” through several frames. Traditionally, most people view virginity as a sexual transition from childhood to adulthood through vaginal-penile intercourse, though people often recognize virginity loss among same-sex couples who engage in other forms of genital sex. For some, virginity is viewed as a gift that may be given to another sexual partner; for others, virginity functions as a stigma that prevents them from progressing in their social life. Still, others see the loss of virginity as one step in the process of growing up and developing healthy relationships with romantic partners. Research has also shown that views and interpretations often change over time, especially in response to new experiences. Overall, these variations demonstrate that virginity is far from a simple biological truth. 
The different meanings and interpretations of virginity and loss can have significant social consequences as well. Virginity pledges — promises to remain abstinent until marriage–are one very well researched example. Under this view, pledgers perceive sex as sacred, solely for marriage, and heterosexual. About 12 percent of young people pledge abstinence, though most break that pledge before marriage. Those who break their pledges face negative consequences, including higher possibility for pregnancies and contracting HPV. Social context — including religiosity and the identities of others — contributes to who keeps their pledges.

Family Meal Conflict

Mahala Miller on November 14, 2019
Peaceful holiday meals may still be the ideal, but they are not the norm. The image shows part of a World War II propaganda poster by Norman Rockwell, proclaiming, “OURS… to fight for: Freedom from want,” via Wikimedia Commons.

As we prepare for Thanksgiving, many people look forward to sharing a warm meal with their family and friends. Others dread the holiday, gearing up to argue with their relatives or answer nosey questions. TSP has written about the political minefield that holiday meals can be in the past. This year we want to point out that the roots of difficult dinners actually run deep in everyday family mealtime. Thanksgiving, like any family mealtime, has the potential for conflict. 

Scholars have documented how important meal time can be for families in terms of cultivating relationships and family intimacy. However, they also show that despite widespread belief that families should share “happy meals” together, meals can be emotionally painful and difficult for some families and family members.
Disagreements between parents and children arise at mealtime, in part, because of the meal itself. Some caregivers go to battle with “picky eaters.” Migrant parents struggle to pass cultural food traditions to children born in the United States. Low income parents worry that their children will not like or eat the food they can afford.
Family meals also reproduce conflict between heterosexual partners. Buying, preparing, and serving food are important ways that women fulfill gendered expectations. At family meal-times men continue to do less work but hold more power about how and when dinner is served.
Thanksgiving, or any big holiday meal, can involve disagreements. However, that is not altogether surprising considering that everyday family meals are full of conflicts and tension.

Safety is Social

Jillian LaBranche on November 13, 2019
A woman walks alone in a dark alley. Photo by renee_mcgurk via Flickr.
A woman walks alone in a dark alley. Photo by renee_mcgurk via Flickr.
While opinions of particular environments, situations, or objects may appear to be objectively dangerous or safe, sociologists argue otherwise. Instead, they find that opinions about safety are subjective. While there is a physical reality of harm and fear, beliefs about safety and danger spread through socialization, rather than direct observation. For example, Simpson notes that snakes and turtles can both cause illness and death through the transmission of venom or bacteria, yet snakes are seen as dangerous and turtles as benign. In other words, danger and safety do not exist on their own; they are contextual.
Socialized beliefs about safety and danger are also raced, classed, and gendered. While statistics indicate that men are predominantly the victims of violent crime, women express greater fear of crime. This fear often acts as a form of social control by limiting women’s daily activities, like when they leave the house and what they wear. Furthermore, the construction of fear and crime is often tied to racist legacies. In the United States, white women express prejudicial fear about areas marked as “dangerous” or “sketchy,” due to the occupation of this space by men of color.
Safety and danger are also constructed at the international level, as national security is politicized. For example, instances of large-scale political violence, such as genocide, war, and acts of terrorism revolve around the social construction of an enemy. More generally, national enemies are constructed as dangerous and a threat to the safety of a nation’s people. This construction of the enemy and perception of fear can move people to join terrorist organizations, participate in genocidal regimes, and enlist in state militaries.

Media Literacy and Trust in the Media

Allison J. Steinke on November 4, 2019

A man reads a newspaper by the wall, by Garry Knight, via Flickr CC.

This post was created in collaboration with the Minnesota Journalism Center. 

According to Gallup, 45% of Americans polled trusted the mass media in 2018. Reuters Institute’s 2019 Digital News Report found similar trends among citizens in 37 countries around the globe: the average level of trust in the news is at 42%, and only 23% say they trust news they find on social media. Further, Edelman’s 2019 Trust Barometer found that, globally, people trust their employers, NGOs, and businesses before the media “to do what is right.”

Media literacy goes hand in hand with trust in the media, especially for younger generations. But studies show that news media has become neglected in media literacy education systems worldwide. To help young people in school better understand how to cultivate a sense of literacy about news consumption, educators could provide examples of what positive engagement with social media and news looks like. Studies show that recommending what young people shouldn’t do on social media — something scholars call “protectionist discourse” — isn’t very helpful.
Scholars argue that it is also useful to distinguish news literacy from concepts such as media literacy and digital literacy. According to Melissa Tully and colleagues, news literacy is defined as: “Knowledge of the personal and social processes by which news is produced, distributed, and consumed, and skills that allow users some control over these processes.” In this model, news literacy includes: “Context,” “Consumption,” “Circulation,” “Creation,” and “Content.”
These 5 “C’s” contribute to how media literacy is part of a healthy, functioning democracy: in a polarized era of partisanship and distrust (learn more about political polarization here), literacy can help consumers embrace differences and facilitate connections for the common good. However, some citizens avoid the news altogether. These “news avoiders” contribute to a culture that evades the need for literacy altogether in a post-fact and post-truth society.

What Makes a Good Story?

Amy August on October 15, 2019

Illustration of Game of Thrones characters who are unimpressed while watching the show. By Silueta Production House via Vimeo.

Let’s face it: lots of fans despised the final season of Game of Thrones. Earlier this year, Scientific American suggested that’s because the storytelling style changed from sociological to psychological. When the storytelling was sociological, the characters evolved often in dramatic, unpredictable ways in response to the broader institutional settings, and the countervailing incentives and norms that surrounded them. When the style switched to psychological, viewers had to identify with the characters on a personal level and become invested in them for the story to work. Within this individualistic framing, characters’ unexpectedly evil actions and untimely deaths stopped making sense. As it happens, not only is sociological storytelling an important driver in keeping audiences devoted, it can also be a powerful tool in crafting a persuasive research article.

Research suggests that storytelling is powerful precisely because it gives human faces to abstract social forces, emplotting them as combatants over the very problems which social theory endeavors to understand — conflict, inequality, and modernization, to name but a few. Andrew Abbott thus argues for a lyrical sociology that recreates the experience of social discovery in the reader. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot and Jessica Hoffmann Davis similarly suggest that to capture the complexity, dynamics, and subtlety of human experience and organizational life, one must document the voices and visions of the people they are studying.
Is it enough to fashion stories that enthrall readers with captivating narrative arcs, or must scholarship also advance theoretical arguments? In a recent Twitter thread, Jeff Guhin invites discussion of the tension in qualitative work between telling stories about social problems and making arguments. Some sociologists argue that description alone makes a valuable contribution. Scholars doing qualitative work should strive to publish descriptively rich, findings-driven papers that are so grounded and concrete that the reader intuitively grasps the “so what.” Though ethnography may share some characteristics with imaginative writing, Hammersley points out that it is more than that. Ethnographers must grapple with a number of issues as they analyze data and write up their work, just as they do when they choose where and how to collect it.
Using our sociological imagination in storytelling doesn’t mean discounting characters’ personal or psychological motivations. Instead, it means showing characters in ongoing and complex interaction with the economic and political forces of broader society and illustrating the consequences that emerge. This can be a powerful tool for learning social theory.

Who Gets a Special Education?

Amy August on September 26, 2019

An elementary school student shows her younger friend how to sign using American Sign Language. Photo by daveynin, Flickr CC.

Since the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHA) in 1975 and the more comprehensive Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in 1990, the number of children receiving special education services has increased dramatically. Today, seven million children in the United States receive special education to meet their individual needs, with more than ever attending their neighborhood schools as opposed to separate schools or institutions.

Because special education has become so institutionalized in schools over the past three decades, we often take for granted that the categories we use to classify people with special needs are socially constructed. For instance, Minnesota has thirteen categorical disability areas, ranging from autism spectrum disorders to blind-visual impairment to traumatic brain injury. But these categories differ from state to state, as do states’ definitions for each category and their protocols for determining when a child meets the diagnostic criteria in a given area. A more sociological take suggests that the “special ed” label does more than just entitle children to receipt of services. For better or worse, it also helps to establish their position within the structure of the mass education system, and to define their relationships with other students, administrators, and professionals.
Research suggests that children of color are overdiagnosed and underserved. They are more likely to be referred for special education testing and to receive special education services than others. This disproportionality occurs more often in categories for which diagnosis relies on the “art” of professional judgment, like emotionally disturbed (ED) or learning disabled (LD). It occurs less often in categories that require little diagnostic inference like deafness or blindness. The attribution of labels can be particularly concerning for children of color, as these labels can be associated with lower teacher and peer expectations and reduced curricular coverage. Even when appropriately placed in special education classes, children of color often receive poorer services than disabled white children. Some research suggests that this happens because the culture and organization of schools encourages teachers to view students of color as academically and behaviorally deficient.
Given the disproportionate representation of students of color in special education, sociologists have investigated whether a child’s race or ethnicity elevates their likelihood of special education placement. By controlling for individual-, school-, and district-level factors, researchers have found that race and social class are not significant predictors of placement. However, school characteristics — like the overall level of student ability — play a role in determining who gets diagnosed. And, because children of color tend to be concentrated in majority-minority schools, they are less likely to be diagnosed than their white peers.

You may also be interested in a previous article: “Autism Across Cultures.”


For more information on children and youth with disabilities, check out the National Center for Education Statistics.

Advanced Placement Testing Season

Amy August on May 4, 2015

Students take the AP Statistics test. Photo by Adrian Sampson via Flickr.
Students take the AP Statistics test. Photo by Adrian Sampson via Flickr.

 

As senioritis infects graduating classes across the U.S., one group of students is denied the thrill of the “senior slide”: those enrolled in Advanced Placement courses. These students look forward to a grueling gauntlet of 3-hour exams on topics ranging from Computer Science to Studio Art to Chinese Language and Culture. The tests are rigorous, cumulative assessments of each student’s mastery of an entire year’s worth of class content, and they have extremely high stakes. College Board, the organization that creates and scores the exams (as well as the SAT), claims high AP scores help students “stand out in the admissions process.” While these tests only seem to target elite, high achieving students, they also impact educational processes school-wide.

AP classes are a source of inequality in educational attainment. Minority and low-income students are more likely to attend schools offering fewer AP courses. Even when courses are available, these students are also more likely to be underrepresented in them relative to their more affluent and white peers.
Policies aiming to increase AP courses at underprivileged schools may be one way to narrow the gap, since parent/student demand and school officials’ response in more affluent districts are likely driving the difference. The proportion of upper-middle class students at a school is an excellent predictor of both the number of AP courses offered and the number of students who enroll.
AP tests weren’t always used in college admissions. They were originally designed to allow high-achieving students to place out of introductory courses and into more advanced college work. Only in recent years have they become an important indicator for college admissions boards.
AP testing culture affects all students, no matter where they’re tracked. In most cases, tests change curricula by narrowing content to tested subjects, fragmenting content area knowledge into test-related pieces, and increasing teacher-centered instruction. However, certain types of high-stakes tests can encourage curricular content expansion, integration of knowledge, and cooperative learning.

Waitlists and Worse: Rebuilding VA Health Care

Amy August on June 3, 2014

Eric Shinseki resigned last Friday as head of the Department of Veterans Affairs, stating that “the VA needs new leadership”. This comes in the wake of scheduling issues at VA medical centers leading to extended delays for veterans’ healthcare—issues he now recognizes as a “systemic lack of integrity” involving a widespread cover-up. According to a new VA audit report prompted by a series of CNN investigations, deadly delays in care were being suppressed by clinics driven to meet performance targets. The VA report concluded that the 14-day wait time performance target was “simply not attainable,” and it called for a “long-term, comprehensive reset” of the broken system. While  Shinseki acknowledges these problems, how reasonable is it to expect his successor to fix them? Research shows that scheduling issues are only one barrier among many to veterans’ accessing care.

When predicting which people will seek care, sociologists take into account patients’ prior experiences with the system such as health outcomes and customer satisfaction. Poor service doesn’t just hurt the veterans who seek care—it may keep them from seeking care in the first place!
Some veterans are eligible for both Medicaid and VA services. The largest group of these vets relies on Medicaid rather than VA care or a combination of the two.
Issues with gender in the military also have an effect. Female veterans have less access to VA healthcare relative to males, with 19% of women reporting delayed health care or unmet needs. Knowledge gaps about VA care, perceptions that providers are not gender-sensitive, and a history of military sexual assault predicted women’s likelihood to delay or forgo treatment.