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.
Higher Education
- TAs at Brandeis have successfully negotiated a union contract.
- Private university spending on administration is growing much faster than enrollments – though some of that spending may pay off for students in terms of graduation rates and placements.
- How to help our new faculty colleagues.
- A student is suing Columbia University and a former Dean for coercing her into a sexual relationship after she went to the Dean to ask for help after having been assaulted.
- “In this way, Avital’s case has become a strange referendum on literary study. Generations of scholars have been suckled at the teat of interpretation: We spend our days parsing commas and decoding metaphors. We get high on finding meaning others can’t. We hoard it, like dragons. We would be intellectually humiliated to learn that the truth was plain: that Avital quite simply sexually harassed her student, just as described. Sometimes analysis is simply denial with more words.” Andrea Long Chu has an amazing essay about working with Avital Ronell, and inequality and power in elite humanities spaces.
Race and Racism
- Margaret Hagerman discusses her new book, White Kids, about how privilege white teenagers learn about race in their segregated environments.
- The sisterhood behind the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. (And for another woman who made A. Philip Randolph’s historic work possible, read Mary Scanlon’s biography of Anna Arnold Hedgeman Until There Is Justice.)
Sex, Gender, and Sexism
- California became the first state to condemn medically unnecessary surgeries for intersex children.
- Julia Serano takes a critical look at research on “rapid onset gender dysphoria”, a category which emerged in anti-trans internet fora.
- “Lean in”-style career advice for women is basically gaslighting, and emphasizing such advice leads people to downplay structural explanations for & solutions to gender inequality in the workplace.
Political Economy
- Justin Fox reviews the history of worker representation on corporate boards in Germany, which it turns out resulted in part from all of the managers having been Nazis, in contrast to the trade unions, and follows up with a piece on why the US didn’t follow the same path.
- Vanessa Williamson looks at how the Republican tax cuts will affect their electoral prospects, arguing that the short-term effect rates to be small, but the long term effect may be larger as the tax cuts will lead to more extremely rich people willing to back the GOP.
