asa podcast party to replace social media soiree!

For many years now, bloggers, tweeters, and other digitally-minded social sociology types have gathered at the American Sociology Association’s annual meeting. This year, scatterplot will not be organizing our own event but we are happy to announce the following event organized by the podcasting team at The Annex, and which we hope will serve as a suitable replacement.

ASA Friends of the Podcast Party!

Mark your calendars and spread the word! Friends of The Annex Sociology Podcast will be having drinks at ASA 2019 on Monday night. If you’ve interacted with us online over the past couple years, please come by and say “hi” and meet some of the great guests who have been on our show.

If you know nothing of the podcast, check us out on your favorite podcast platform: The Annex Sociology Podcast. Or visit www.sociocast.org/annex

Details:

DATE: Monday, August 12 at 7:30PM

PLACE: Peter Dillon’s at 2 East 36th Street, New York

NOTE: There are two Peter Dillon’s. Make sure you go to the East 36th Street location

Additional note: Interested in podcasting? Do you run your own podcast? Thinking of starting one? Please write joe@sociocast.orgjoe@sociocast.org!

protecting students or enabling trolls? why faculty evaluations should not be totally anonymous

The following is a guest post by Robin Fowler.

I want to start by noting that I unequivocally appreciate the value of student feedback. In addition to the University-coordinated teaching evaluations, I regularly collect input from students regarding my pedagogical choices. Most of the feedback I get through both my own and the university’s evaluation systems is useful and gives me ideas for improving my courses and my teaching. Often, it is very constructive or even heartwarming.

However, the true anonymity of the student evaluations opens the door to trolling and other absolutely inappropriate communication to instructors; students say things via open-ended feedback that they would never say face-to-face or if they thought their comments could later be attributed to them (by anyone). There is a strong literature on communication medium, and total anonymity in particular, allowing for a total disregard of the impact of your words on your addressee. This leads to a few very inappropriate comments, which disproportionately affect under-represented groups but which are terrible for all of us. As our institutions work to create a more inclusive environment for students and faculty, it’s appropriate they consider the raced and gendered comments given a platform in this anonymous channel.   

guest post: asa session organizers should accept extended abstracts

The following is a guest post by Daniel Laurison.

There are three things that bug me about the ASA conference submission system. I want to tell you briefly about each of them, and then what I’m trying to do about one of them. Over the years since I started really paying attention to ASA (sometime in 2007 or 2008, I think) I’ve asked many people over various media if they have an argument FOR any of these three elements of the system, and haven’t heard anything that convinced me, but I am entirely open to the fact that I’m missing something.

(TL;DR = I’m going to accept extended abstracts at my session on elites at ASA 2020; I hope other session organizers will do the same; if you’re on board, go to bit.ly/AbstractsASA)

the democratic electorate

The current conventional wisdom, expressed for example in this NYT Upshot piece, as well as by Bret Stephens on MSNBC yesterday (June 5) is that the vocal “left” of the Democratic party has lost touch with the authentic base of the party, and therefore risks re-electing Trump by veering too far left.

I believe this analysis suffers from a theoretical mistake that enables its pundit providers to ignore certain empirical evidence while trumpeting other such evidence. Here’s why.