The following is a guest post by Jenn Lena and Terry McDonnell.
While cultural sociologists have had numerous debates about method in recent years (ethnography v. interviews v. forced choice surveys!), we have been far less attentive to questions of measurement. Our new book, Measuring Culture, aims to fill this gap. We start with the simplest question: Who might benefit from our book?
Continue reading “why do we need a book about measuring culture?”As I’m sure everyone knows, after an ambitious plan to open the campus for in-person instruction one week earlier than normal, we at UNC-Chapel Hill had to reverse course only a little more than week in, moving nearly all classes online and sending most students home. This post is my attempt to draw lessons from this very demoralizing experience.
Continue reading “which lessons learned?”A few years ago, Neal Caren started the “intro to sociology syllabus project” on scatterplot, and it was such a useful resource for me and many others. Extending that project, this post is a space to share medical sociology syllabuses (or Society & Health, Sociology of Health & Illness, or– as you’ll see below– any of the many other course titles we use for related classes).
Many thanks to everyone who has shared their syllabus with me! If you sent me a syllabus and have an update, I’ll happily post. And if you’d like to participate, please send me your syllabus. If you end up borrowing ideas from any of the syllabuses below, I recommend sending the instructor a note so they can know that their syllabus was useful to you.
The following is a guest post by Emma Frankham.
“There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting” – Attributed to Poet Robert Graves
Academics spend significant time learning research skills. However, little time is devoted to learning writing and editing skills. Through providing academic editing services I’ve developed a checklist for writing improvement. I arm myself with this checklist, the ASA Style Guide, and The Chicago Manual of Style. Following this checklist will reduce your word count, tighten your argument, and improve the flow of your writing. I hope you find this checklist helpful when you wrangle with your next manuscript.
Continue reading “a checklist to reduce your word count and polish your writing”In 2018, I taught my first graduate seminar on economic sociology. In general, I was very happy with how the syllabus and course came together. But I struggled to figure out how to best incorporate discussions of race & racism into the course. There just wasn’t very much research on the topic in economic sociology. For the course, I mostly borrowed work that’s usually identified as part of either inequality or organizations research, and then talked about my frustration in not finding a robust conversation within economic sociology proper (to the extent those fields are separable, which is its own important conversation). This frustration is part of what motivated my collaboration with Laura Garbes where we 1) examine the history of economic sociology’s (non)engagement with race, and 2) offer an overview of recent developments in the sociology of race with the aim of guiding economic sociologists who do want to put race & racism at the center of their work. In this post, I return to my initial motivations to offer suggestions about how I would approach teaching race & racism in an economic sociology graduate seminar in light of the work that Laura and I have done, and in light of new research that has emerged in the past couple years at this intersection.
Continue reading “teaching the new economic sociology of race & racism”This is a guest post by Jose Itzigsohn, written in response to my prior post .
Erin McDonnell organized a wonderful panel on Rethinking Sociological Theory and Andrew Perrin published in Scatterplot a thoughtful response to the panel that included a critique of my arguments. I asked Prof. Perrin whether Scatterplot would publish my response and he readily agreed. I thank him and welcome the opportunity to elaborate on the call to decolonize sociological theory.
Continue reading “on decolonizing sociological theory – a reply to perrin”
Yesterday’s panel on teaching classical social theory was fantastic. Erin McDonnell did a great job organizing and facilitating, and the four panelists — Greta Krippner, Jose Itzigsohn, Zine Magubane, and Jocelyn Viterna — offered really thoughtful, measured, and inspiring ideas. The session was remarkably well-attended, particularly for summer: I think around 100 people showed up. Awesome!
I want to raise a few thoughts about what I hope will be ongoing discussions and reforms in this vein.
Continue reading “decolonizing classical theory: some appreciatively skeptical thoughts”
The following is a guest post by Zawadi Rucks-Ahidiana.
In March, universities across the country shifted to online learning and adopted policies to account for students’ lives in the midst of a global pandemic. Many administrators asked professors to consider students’ circumstances and to teach with compassion. My university advised that “Our students’ lives are already complex, and shifting instructional modes in the middle of the semester will increase complications. Some students may also, unfortunately, become ill. Be prepared to provide more flexibility than usual.” While there were debates about what that should look like, the message was universally one of empathy and compassion. Yet the tone around decisions about the fall has been business as usual. Instead of compassion, the implicit message became one of returning to normalcy. As one university President stated of the decision to go online in the fall, “we will focus our attention on perfecting remote learning, teaching and working. It will not be the same, but it will be good.” This despite that it seems unlikely that anything about the fall will be normal for students or any other university employees for that matter. We can all hope for normal operations by September, but it is imperative to enter the fall with the same compassion with which we finished out the spring. COVID continues to affect Americans’ lives and the frustration and anger of recent BLM protests remains unaddressed.
Continue reading “facing the fall with empathy”Earlier this week, the US government announced a new policy that would prevent international students from staying in the country if their universities offered entirely online courses. This policy was designed to force universities to reopen, even if doing so is unsafe and against public health advice. Harvard and MIT have already sued to prevent the policy taking effect and other universities have condemned the policy.
Sociologist Heba Gowayed organized the below open letter for faculty to express their opposition to this cruel policy. More than 15,000 academics have signed the letter so far. You can sign the letter here and view the list of signatories here. Another petition (for anyone, not just faculty) has garnered almost 200,000 signatures and can be signed here.
Continue reading “15,000+ academics oppose international student ban”The following post is co-authored with Jessica Calarco.
In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, policymakers at the national, state, and local level are scrambling to decide what can reopen while limiting the virus’s spread. In some sense, we can think of the overall rate of infection of the virus as a kind of budget constraint. As long as the rate of spread is kept below 1, the virus is under control. If too much opens up, and the rate goes above 1, the virus will begin to overwhelm the healthcare system, as we’re currently seeing in Arizona, South Carolina, and Texas. Keeping everything closed would certainly help avoid that outcome. But keeping everything closed also comes with costs to the economic and social/emotional well-being of individuals, organizations, and society as a whole. Thus, the question that policymakers face – at least assuming they want to avoid massive, unnecessary deaths – is what to reopen given that some things have to stay closed? Or, put differently, which institutions are so critical to society that reopening them for in-person use is ultimately worth the risk?
Continue reading “colleges are more like cruise ships and bars than kindergartens and elementary schools”Discussions of racism tend to get tangled up in issues of level of analysis.1 Sociologists (e.g. Bonilla-Silva) and critical race theorists (e.g. Haney-López), among others, have long argued that we need to understand racism as something that works “beyond” or “above” the individual, building on arguments that go back to Stokely Carmichael’s distinction between individual and institutional racism. In talking through these ideas with friends and students, I’ve found that the terminology can be confusing – in part because sociologists (and non-sociologists) have used terms like institution and structure to mean so many different, overlapping things. In this post, I outline my idiosyncratic terminology for characterizing different levels of racism when trying to explain these interwoven concepts. For me, it’s been useful to break down racism into four levels that are at least partially nested: individual, organizational, institutional, and systemic.2
Continue reading “levels of racism: individual, organizational, institutional, and systemic”The following is a guest post by Nabila Islam.
On Friday, June 12, 2020, fourteen[1] sociology graduate students at Brown University held a teach-in on how to support BLM in academia at the Population Studies Training Center (PSTC), an interdisciplinary center for the study of population issues. The teach-in evolved from the invitation that sociology graduate students (with support of staff and faculty) had extended in the department’s statement in support of BLM. The letter had urged members of the sociology community to have conversations with and beyond each other on how to combat anti-black racism and to produce anti-racist research. Susan Short, sociologist and Director of PSTC, asked graduate students if they wanted to hold an event or a meeting at the center as a follow-up. The students decided on holding a teach-in on race and racism in the academy. In the tradition of teach-ins and public sociology, the event mixed theoretical discussions with conversations about praxis and centered the coming together of the PSTC community to discuss recent political events and possible futures. During the second part of the teach-in, the attendees were invited to participate in facilitated breakout sessions to brainstorm anti-racist practices in research, as well as in institutional and interpersonal situations within the academy. The suggestions below are the result of those collaborative conversations. Recently there have been discussions on how professors in all disciplines can talk to students about race and racism. Teach-ins potentially provide a way to challenge status and generational divides between students, staff and faculty on campus while offering opportunities to rearticulate the meaning of community and to create anti-racist publics within the academy.
Continue reading “anti-racist research practices and the value of teach-ins”What is transmitted in higher learning?… Limiting ourselves to a narrowly functionalist point of view, an organized stock of established knowledge is the essential thing that is transmitted. The application of new technologies to this stock may have a considerable impact on the medium of communication. It does not seem absolutely necessary that the medium be a lecture delivered in person by a teacher in front of silent students, with questions reserved for sections or “practical work” sessions run by an assistant. To the extent that learning is translatable into computer language and the traditional teacher is replaceable by memory banks, didactics can be entrusted to machines linking traditional memory banks (libraries, etc.) and computer data banks to intelligent terminals placed at the students’ disposal. Pedagogy would not necessarily suffer. The students would still have to be taught something: not contents, but how to use the terminals.
Continue reading “galloway and the perpetually-to-come disruption”
The following is a guest post by Mo Torres.
Abolition is in the public eye like never before. In five years, we’ve gone from “require body cameras and implicit bias training” to “defund the police.” Longtime abolitionist Mariame Kaba is in the New York Times: “Yes, we mean literally abolish the police.”
As a discipline that has had much to say about racism, policing, and incarceration, where do sociologists fit into this new picture, where abolition is not simply a fringe position, but one front-and-center in current debates?
Continue reading “an invitation to abolition for the curious sociologist”
Guest post from Todd Lu reposted from Race, Politics, Justice
Much excellent work has been written about the need for systemic reform of policing in the US, the discrimination and inequalities faced by Black Americans, and the brave struggles of anti-racist protesters amidst the ongoing police repression and the unprecedented COVID-19 global pandemic. As social movements go, the ongoing mobilizations have clearly set the political agenda of anti-racism in a news cycle previously dominated by public health policies around COVID-19. Right now, it’s far too early to tell the political and cultural consequences of the current protests, but what we do know so far from the data is that this current wave is significantly larger than previous protest waves in the past. Since it has been a couple of weeks since George Floyd’s death, we are starting to get data trickling in on the scale and size of the current anti-police brutality protests. I will focus here on presenting some preliminary statistics and figures of the current Black Lives Matter protests and compare them with previous mobilizations. Continue reading “recent anti-police brutality protests since George Floyd’s death are far arger than previous Black Lives Matter protest waves”
