resources for new assistant professors

A couple of months ago, I asked on Twitter if there were any resources for new assistant professors comparable to Jess Calarco’s A Field Guide to Grad School or Fabio Rojas’s Grad Skool Rulz. Folks there had a bunch of suggestions that I thought I would compile here for posterity. Note that I have not personally read all of the suggestions. And please feel free to suggest more resources in the comments!

sase mini-conference on economic racism & racial capitalism (deadline 1/25/22!)

I’m very excited to be co-organizing a mini-conference at the upcoming meetings of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) on the theme of “Economic Racism, Ethnic Chauvinism, Racial Capitalism: Foregrounding Race, Ethnicity and Immigration in a Fractious Economy.” The full call is below. Submissions are due January 25th and the mini-conference will take place as part of the larger SASE meetings in Amsterdam July 9-11. To submit, send an 500-or-less word abstract through the SASE system here (requires creating an account and logging in). If you have any questions, leave a comment or shoot me a message!

comments on rodríguez-muñiz’s “figures of the future: latino civil rights and the politics of demographic change”

Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz recently published an excellent book on the population politics of Latino civil right advocates: Figures of the Future: Latino Civil Rights and the Politics of Demographic Change. I had the chance to comment on the book at the Social Science History Association meetings, alongside Emily Merchant and Debra Thompson. Below are my comments for those interested in learning more about the book.

comments on krause’s “model cases: on canonical research objects and sites”

Monika Krause recently published a fascinating new book at the intersection of sociology and philosophy of social science: “Model Cases: On Canonical Research Objects and Sites.” I had the chance to comment on the book at the Social Science History Association meetings this week, alongside Fiona Greenland and Julian Go. Below are my comments for those interested in learning more about the book.

fuck advice columns

The following is a guest post by Victoria Reyes.

I used to write columns for Inside Higher Ed, for example, that pinpointed practices that can help grad students, postdocs, and faculty not just survive, but thrive in the academy, even in the midst of crises. 

Why is it, then, that I’ve recently become so angry when I see similar, recent essays? Like the one describing the habits of successful faculty during the pandemic. Here the author stated: 

the racial blinders of assimilation theory

The following is a guest post by José Itzigsohn.

I was recently reminded of the racial blinders of assimilation theory while reading an article by Richard Alba, Morris Levy, and Dowel Myers published in The Atlantic. The article is titled “The Myth of a Majority-Minority America”. The article argues that the “narrative that nonwhite people will soon outnumber white people is not only divisive, but also false.” I find the authors’ argument problematic and revealing of the racial unconscious (or not so unconscious) of assimilation theory.

values are not science-free, trans justice edition

Last month, Sociologists for Trans Justice released a statement condemning the wave of anti-trans legislation that has been proposed in state legislatures across the United States. The statement includes a link to a new reader titled #ProtectTransYouth which collects valuable resources for those interested in learning more.

One section of the statement struck me as especially well-phrased and useful for thinking through the relationships between science and activism and between facts and values. This topic is of perennial interest but has been especially salient in sociology in the wake of, among other things, the 2016 election and the Trump administration, the 2019 American Sociological Association annual meeting theme on “Engaging Social Justice for a Better World”, and the growth of the Du Boisian Scholar Network with its mission of “scholarship at the service of emancipation & liberation.”

say their names: ida b. wells and the humanizing of data

The following is a guest post by Allen Hillery.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett was an American investigative journalist, educator and early leader in the civil rights movement. Born July 16, 1862 she dedicated most of her life combating prejudice and violence with the goal of achieving African-American equality. She researched and documented lynching in the United States in an attempt to bring awareness across the country and the world. Using data, she exposed the increasing use of lynching of African American men following the emancipation proclamation. 

what about du bois? a response to prasad’s critique of emancipatory sociology

The following is a guest post by Rory Kramer.

I highly recommend Monica Prasad’s recent piece in Socius advocating for problem-solving sociology as our era’s pragmatism. I cannot emphasize enough how smart it is and how much I love the idea of pragmatism as an escape from philosophical debates that are fun to have late at night, but more often than not lead nowhere in terms of getting stuff done. And I think the examples at the end, like Aliza Luft’s work on genocide, are great examples of sociology done well and summarized in the piece fantastically.

To try to summarize a complicated, in-depth piece in a quick paragraph or so (please read the whole thing), Prasad convincingly identifies three themes in how sociologists conceptualize the goal our work: rationalist, skeptic, and emancipatory. The rationalist studies for the sake of knowledge itself—the ultimate and exclusive goal of study is to understand society, regardless of whether or not society improves (or gets worse) thanks to that knowledge. The emancipatory studies for the sake of improving society—arguing that we should search for knowledge to create a better society, else it be squandering our efforts. The skeptic questions both whether or not sociology and academic discourse itself is at all useful, merging in some ways the critiques of rationalists toward emancipation and emancipatory scholars’ critiques of rationalist inaction into an almost meta-analysis of why and how we study and how that explains why reason is inadequate both as a driver of social change and as a means toward truth.

lovecraft and american history behind the veil

H.P. Lovecraft was an influential science fiction/fantasy and horror author in the early 20th century United States. His popularity has been on the rise for some time now, with his work and ideas featured in everything from board games to TV shows. My morning walk to the office in Providence passes though H.P. Lovecraft square, and monuments to him litter the East Side of Providence where he lived.

Lovecraft was also a massive and unapologetic racist. And his racism was not somehow an incidental and unrelated aspect of his persona, it was central to the themes of his work: xenophobia, fear of the unknowable other, threats to civilized men lurking at the edges of the Earth, and so on. Recognition of Lovecraft’s racism has led to two interesting and parallel kinds of reevaluations: on one hand, trying to remove him from a pedestal like a Confederate monuments (e.g. in 2015 the World Fantasy Award was changed to no longer resemble Lovecraft) and, on the other, producing a set of modern “Lovecraftian” works that explicitly reject his racism and xenophobia and re-read his works in that light. Two notable projects are Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country, a book and then TV show that offers a kind “Get Out” rereading of Lovecraft where the real horror is racist white people, and Ruthanna Emrys’ Innsmouth Legacy series, so far containing a pair of novels that reimagines a classic Lovecraft story by connecting it to the internment of Japanese Americans in WWII and retelling that story from the perspective of the marginalized racial others whom Lovecraft so feared.

What I want to do in the rest of this post is, in that spirit, offer a re-reading of a fairly popular Lovecraft quote (from the opening “The Call of Cthulhu”) through the lens of Du Bois’s understanding of the veil to make sense of a recurrent dynamic in discussions of American history. First, here’s the quote:

bringing communities together with the #DuBoisChallenge

The following is a guest post by Allen Hillery.

Earlier this month, Sekou Tyler, Anthony Starks and myself launched a #DuBoisChallenge on Twitter. With Anthony’s github repository, we were able to curate a 10 week challenge where we’re asking participants to recreate Du Bois’ iconic visualizations. Our goal is to celebrate W.E.B. Du Bois as a data visualization pioneer and bring more recognition to his accomplishments. W.E.B. Du Bois is a well known author and civil rights activist but his accomplishments as a sociologist who leveraged data visualization to tell a narrative of resilience and perseverance for Black America is just beginning to gain traction mainstream.

Du Bois’s original visualizations, one for each of the 10 weeks. These plates range from line graphs, bar charts, pie charts, area charts all the way to the more advanced spiral graphs. 

how can sociologists face the climate crisis? an “all-of-sociology” approach

The following is a guest post by Abigail Andrews and Ariana Thompson-Lastad.

When we began writing this piece, it was August 2020, and the skies in California were thick with smoke. As we breathed the toxic air with our preschool-aged children, we felt the climate crisis anew. The feeling intensified our agony about what we should do – as activists, as white people, as women, and as sociologists. We try to read the latest science and learn about what we can do. We’re making lifestyle shifts, like flying less and re-using bags. And we use our spare time to press lawmakers for pro-climate policy. But as parents of little ones, we don’t have much spare time. We wanted to make changes that cut more to the core of our work. Was sociology just the wrong field? (Why didn’t we study biology?!) Ariana studies healthcare and health equity, and Abigail studies gender and migration. Should we drop our current research and focus on environmental sociology? Either of those answers seemed to obscure the scope of the changes upon us.

The climate emergency is our existential disaster. The social costs are here: pandemics, toxic air and water, violence, mass migration, and grief, among many others. The devastation is terrifying, and it’s going to get worse. In the face of great fear, how do we find hope – for ourselves, our students, our children, and all the world’s children? How do we manage the rapid transformation of society with creativity, intelligence, and grace? And how do we come together (especially amidst a pandemic and ongoing racism and anti-Blackness), instead of hunkering down to protect the few?

bad science, computational imperialism, and the economy of attention

The following is a guest post by Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra.

Here we are, yet again, discussing a paper that, through computational means, resurrects painful ghosts from the past.

Here we are, yet again, discussing the myriad problems of design, inference, and logic behind Michal Kosinski’s work.

Here we are, yet again, trying to painstakingly explain why physiognomy is an intellectual dead end, even when powered by the engines of modern computation.

Here we are. Again.

some notes on the impact of student debt forgiveness across income groups

The following is a guest post by Raphaël Charron-Chénier and Louise Seamster.

As the debate over student debt cancellation ramps up, some of the more basic information about the impact of different loan forgiveness plans is not easy to find. Because some of our work has informed the current debate, we often get questions about how some of the more prominent policy proposals would impact borrowers at different income levels. Here, we’re sharing some basic analyses that look at where Black and White borrowers tend to fall, and how Senators Schumer and Warren’s recent proposal to cancel $50,000 in debt for all households would impact them.

climate change economics goes to congress

Who speaks authoritatively about climate change? What role, in particular, do social scientific experts play in the conversation? This second question in particular is a key part of my next big research project on debates over the costs of climate change. Today, I was delighted to read a new paper by Maher et al that presents an incredibly useful new and freely-available dataset of testimony offered at congressional hearings in the U.S. by social scientists. Making use of their data, I was able to get a little bit of insight into one piece of this question. Spoiler: not that many social scientists have testified before Congress about climate change, but those who have are overwhelmingly economists.