sociology, science fiction, and superheroes

The following guest post by Michael Kennedy is the first of a series on sociology and science fiction.

It’s good to travel in company that does not keep the boundaries between sociology and other knowledge cultures too high, especially when it comes science fiction!

For someone like me who has worked on utopia, dystopia, and eutopia for some time, science fiction is an essential part of the trade, especially in east central Europe and Eurasia. During my last trip to Europe’s last university in exile, European Humanities University, I joined a workshop on creating curricula for a second year seminar in the social sciences. Without batting an eye participants suggested pairing Arendt’s reflections on judgement with Zamyatin’s We, on whose backcover Ursula Le Guin declared “the best single work of science fiction yet written”. Were this discussion in Vilnius, then, we might not consider it exceptional. But it is in America.

I haven’t taken science fiction as far as I might, but I have been revising a book manuscript on superhero sociology for some time. I also contributed to a recent volume on female superheroes, in which I developed an idea of how Elektra, of Marvel Comics and associated films, could be helpful in cultivating critical capacities.[1] But superheroes are different from science fiction.

sunday morning sociology, partisan priorities edition

68% of Democrats and just 18% of Republicans are worried about climate change. Via Pew.

A weekly link round-up of sociological work – work by sociologists, referencing sociologists, or just of interest to sociologists. This scatterplot feature is co-produced with Mike Bader.

class and culture conference

The following is an invitation from Annette Lareau to a Class & Culture Mini-Conference at the Eastern Sociological Association meetings this year. She has organized a dinner along with the conference. This would be a great opportunity, especially for students! The dinner information is in the comments below.

January 20, 2018

Dear ESS Class and Culture attendee,

Anyone attending ESS is welcome to attend the sessions for the ESS Class and Culture Mini Conference. There is not any special registration; you can just show up to the sessions. If you would like to attend the dinner, however, you need to register in advance.

All are welcome to join an informal dinner to continue the conversation including those attending the Class and Culture Mini Conference. The conference begins Friday morning and ends early Saturday afternoon. The dinner will be on Friday February 23^rd, 2018 at 6:30 p.m.

call for guest posts: sociology & science fiction

Following a delightful conversation on Twitter, I’m happy to announce a call for guest posts on the topic of sociology (or social theory) and science fiction! Have you taught a work of science fiction in one of your classes and used it to illustrate some interesting concept or debate in sociology? Let us know how it went! Are you fascinated by the parallels between a work of SF and a work of social theory? Tell us!

To submit, send a short summary of what you’d like to write about to me at this email address with the subject “Sociology & Science Fiction.” Assuming it makes sense to me, you’ll then submit the full post, and I’ll queue them up here.  For some examples of the sorts of things I’ve written like this in the past, check out these old posts – but I’m sure you all can do much better!

sunday morning sociology, vaccine policy success edition

Emily Oster and Geoffrey Kocks write in the NYT about the successful push in CA to increase child vaccination rates by changing the rules, not changing hearts and minds.

A weekly link round-up of sociological work – work by sociologists, referencing sociologists, or just of interest to sociologists. This scatterplot feature is co-produced with Mike Bader.

sunday morning sociology, american exceptionalism (the bad kind) edition

Child mortality in the US is much higher than in similarly wealthy countries, in part due to poverty and guns. Source: Vox.

A weekly link round-up of sociological work – work by sociologists, referencing sociologists, or just of interest to sociologists. This scatterplot feature is co-produced with Mike Bader.

submit your asa paper to socarxiv!

The deadline for submissions to the American Sociological Association annual meeting is midnight tonight. So I’m guessing that many of you reading this post have either just submitted a paper, or are just tweaking that last bit of formatting before submitting. Once you’ve finally navigated the submission site (remember, one regular session and one section session, or two section sessions, but never two regular sessions!), why not submit your paper to SocArXiv as well? The submission process is straightforward, and interested readers will be able to access your paper right now instead of waiting seven months to hear your talk in Philly!

For details on the submission process, check out this quick tutorial. For more information, check out SocArXiv’s FAQ.

guest post: who hires whom?

analyzing from where sociology’s top 10-ranked programs hire their faculty

The following is a guest post by Michael O. Emerson, Provost, North Park University and Senior Fellow, Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research.

I remember when I decided to apply to graduate schools in sociology. I knew almost nothing about where to apply, so I met with my sociology advisor. He told me how sociology programs were ranked in a hierarchy, and that if I ever wanted to work in a top ten department I would need to go to a top ten program; if I wanted to work in a top twenty program, I would need to go to a top twenty program, and so on.

I took his advice to heart and earned my MA and Ph.D. from North Carolina, Chapel Hill, ranked then and now in the top ten. I ended up teaching for fifteen years at Rice University where we started a Ph.D. sociology program about six years ago (too early to be ranked), before becoming provost at my current university.

Although I have always found my sociology advisor’s advice to be qualitatively true, I often wondered how true it is quantitatively. Specifically, for professors working in the top ten ranked sociology programs, where did they earn their Ph.Ds.? Using the 2017 ASA Guide to Graduate Departments of Sociology, with just a bit of work, the answer is fairly straightforward.

sunday morning sociology, women and politics edition

Women are running for Congress in record numbers (source: DailyKos). 

A weekly link round-up of sociological work – work by sociologists, referencing sociologists, or just of interest to sociologists. This scatterplot feature is co-produced with Mike Bader.

It’s a slow news season (in some ways) and either still a vacation, the very beginning of the term, a major conference, or a frantic scramble to submit to ASA depending on your discipline and university, so the links this week are small in number and unsorted (but still, hopefully, high in quality!).