recent anti-police brutality protests since George Floyd’s death are far arger than previous Black Lives Matter protest waves

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.

the importance of demonstrating that communities can police themselves

Guest post by Chloe Haimson, University of Wisconsin-Madison, haimson@wisc.edu Originally posted at Race, Politics, Justice

Note: This piece is based on research collected for a forthcoming paper in Mobilization. 

In recent weeks, heated interactions nationwide between protesters and police, were sparked by the murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American, by a white Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin. Throughout recent history, nearly all social movements have been concerned with the potential impact of police presence at their protests. Protesters have feared police will suppress their activities, use violence against participants, and incite turmoil in the crowd.

However, Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests are singular because they are directly organized in response to police violence and state surveillance.

Citing more broadly

Update 12/7/19 I added a few mechanical suggestions at the bottom of the post

How do you decide what literature to cite when you write an article? Sociologists routinely complain that economists fail to cite the sociological work on the topics they write about. But sociologists themselves are typically citing too narrowly. Most view citations as a matter of nodding (or genuflecting) toward the “key” people or concepts with special attention to making sure to cite anybody who they think might end up reviewing the paper. In the process they focus on a few famous people (mostly White men), often those assigned in the courses taken in grad school, and/or articles published in the American Sociological Review or the American Journal of Sociology. We may also include people we know personally or have met at conferences.

These practices both tend to downplay the contributions of women and people of color and tend to exacerbate the prestige hierarchy in sociology. The #CiteBlackWomen campaign has been importantly pushing back against these practices, but even intentionally citing Black women runs into the problem that there are no race designations in citations so you have to know who is a Black woman to cite them, leading to citations of a few famous people, not a broader base of citations. Reviewers are notorious for “cite me” recommendations or the occasional suggestion of lines of research the writer has missed, but apart from that, a typical journal reviewer is not generally going to have an encyclopedic knowledge of all research in an area and it is not reasonable to expect reviewers to do their own literature searches as part of a review.

I’ve talked to students about their citation practices, and it appears that the most common approach involves sorting Google Scholar search results by number of times cited, and citing the most commonly-cited sources. This, of course, just exacerbates inequality.

So how can we get out of this box? I have been as bad as everyone else for most of my career, but I have recently been working hard to push back against the elitist bias, and want to share some of the strategies I have used to try to expand my citation networks. I urge others to share yours.

Since this post has gotten long, let me begin with my three main take-away points. The rest is strategies for implementation.

1. Look for and cite the most recent work on your empirical topic, paying special attention to work coming from people who are not already highly-cited, less-prestigious institutions, and less-prestigious journals. This requires a broad search strategy, about which more below.
2. If your work takes off from some key theoretical or empirical papers, look for the recent work that cites those papers in Google Scholar or Web of Science, again paying special attention to works by those who are not already elites.
3. Pay attention to work in progress including dissertations, conference papers, and publications in journals your library does not subscribe to.  PDFs of many of these are available online through working paper repositories (SocArXiv, ResearchGate, Academic, SSRN, and many campus or personal web sites); good libraries subscribe to the dissertation database. You can also do an Internet search for the author and email them to ask for a copy of the work and to ask whether there is a published version or related papers. Most people are happy to cooperate when you make these requests.

2019 junior theorist conference call for papers

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: FEBRUARY 11, 2019 BY 11:59PM EST
​The 13th Junior Theorists Symposium (JTS) is now open to new submissions. The symposium will be held in New York, New York on August 9th, 2019. The JTS is a one-day conference featuring the work of emerging sociologists engaged in theoretical work, broadly defined. Sponsored in part by the Theory Section of the ASA, the conference has provided a platform for the work of early career sociologists since 2005. We especially welcome submissions that broaden the practice of theory beyond its traditional themes, topics, and disciplinary function.

It is our honor to announce that Isaac Reed (University of Virginia), Amin Ghaziani (University of British Columbia) and Adia Harvey Wingfield (University of Washington in St. Louis) will serve as discussants for this year’s symposium. In addition, we are pleased to announce an after-panel entitled “Teaching Theory: Debates, Tensions, and Future Directions,” to feature Robin Wagner-Pacifici (The New School), Stefan Timmermans (University of California, Los Angeles), Shamus Khan (Columbia University), and Fabio Rojas (Indiana University, Bloomington). The symposium will also feature a talk by 2018 Junior Theorists Award winner Erin McDonnell (University of Notre Dame).
​
We invite all ABD graduate students, postdocs, and assistant professors who received their PhDs from 2015 onwards to submit up to a three-page précis (800-1000 words). The précis should include the key theoretical contribution of the paper and a general outline of the argument. Successful précis from recent year’s symposium can be viewed here. Please note that the précis must be for a paper that is not under review or forthcoming at a journal.

As in previous years, in order to encourage a wide range of submissions, we do not have a pre-specified theme for the conference. Instead, papers will be grouped into sessions based on emergent themes and discussants’ areas of interest and expertise.

Please submit your précis via this Google form. Fauzia Husain (University of Virginia) and Madeleine Pape (University of Wisconsin-Madison) will review the submissions. You can contact them at juniortheorists@gmail.com with any questions. The deadline is February 11, 2019 by 11:59PM EST. By mid-March we will extend up to 12 invitations to present at JTS 2019. Please plan to share a full paper by July 21, 2019. Presenters will be asked to attend the entire symposium and should plan accordingly.

Finally, for friends and supporters of JTS, we ask if you might consider donating either on-site, or via Venmo (handle @JTS2019, email address juniortheorists@gmail.com). If you are submitting a proposal to JTS 2019, we kindly ask that should you wish to donate, you only do so after the final schedule has been announced.

 

about taking criticism

A PDF version of this post is available at SocArXiv

How do you respond when someone criticizes you? What if you think that criticism is unfair or inappropriate? What if you think the critic has a good point and it makes you feel really bad about yourself? This essay is about constructive ways for responding to criticism about how your style as a person of power or privilege may be hurting others in your teaching or advising. Along the way it addresses the broader problems of taking criticism in general and of cultural differences in interaction styles. The punchline is about trying to be who you are (no personality transplants) in a way that respects both yourself and others and helps make your environment feel inclusive for more marginalized people.

Many professors think that it is important for students to be able to take academic criticism as a normal part of learning to be an academic, but are nevertheless outraged at anyone expecting them to take criticism about the way they give criticism to others, if you follow my point. Many people view themselves as pro-feminist pro-minority pro-queer liberal social justice advocates and are deeply hurt and offended at being told that their personal style or comments are viewed by others as domineering or racist or sexist or homophobic or classist or patronizing or demeaning.

about spousal hires

I’ve talked to a lot of people over the years about how to handle the “two body” problem where your spouse needs a job, too, and your goal is to live in the same house as your spouse.

I can explain what I know about the “rules of the game” regarding spousal hires, and also give my advice about the personal work you need to do to be ready for this. The spousal hiring process usually creates severe stresses on a relationship and I believe it is important to know your priorities or you are at risk of being chewed up. The post is long and has 3 sections: (1) About timing of the discussions; (2) Institutional rules, explaining that these vary from not helping spouses at all at one extreme to providing jobs for spouses at the other, with most falling somewhere in the middle; and (3) The need for spouses to talk honestly with each other (but not necessarily outsiders) about their priorities. 

When Republicans Opposed the Free Speech of David Duke

It is September 1996, California’s Proposition 209, banning gender or race preferences in college admissions, is on the ballot for November. Students at Cal State Northridge organized a debate between former Klansman and ongoing White racist David Duke and Civil Rights activist Joe Hicks on the topic of affirmative action. According to a story in the New York Times Newswire (1996-09-25 EMOTIONS RAGE ON CAMPUS PRIOR TO DAVID DUKE AFFIRMATIVE ACTION),

members of the California State University, Northridge chapter of the College Republicans threatened to initiate a recall drive against student body President Vladimir Cerna unless he resigns by next week. Accusing Cerna of misconduct for his role in bringing Duke to campus, College Republicans President Rod Perry said his group had collected more than the roughly 2,500 signatures needed to launch a recall vote by students.” and “Some of the harshest criticism of Duke’s appearance has come from supporters of Proposition 209, the Nov. 5 California ballot initiative that would end racial and gender preferences in state and local government. Backers of the measure contend that Duke was invited to oppose affirmative action at today’s debate as a ploy to discredit the initiative through association with his extremist views. Duke, a former Louisiana state legislator who just lost his second bid for the U.S. Senate on Saturday, has disavowed his past ties to the Ku Klux Klan but continues to espouse racial separatism and white supremacy.

There was also a court case:

“Meanwhile, a judge Tuesday rejected a second bid to block the Associated Students at CSUN from paying Duke for his appearance. Superior Court Judge William MacLaughlin said there is insufficient evidence to support student Kelly S. Novak’s claim that public money is being illegally spent to help oppose Proposition 209.”

Notice. In 1996, the College Republicans thought it was an unfair attack on their opposition to affirmative action to associate it with a known White racist! There is so much to unpack in this. It is OK to advocate a policy that will have the impact of reducing Black and Hispanic access to college, but they think it is unfair to imply this has anything to do with overt White racism.

What about minorities? The news story says that the minority student organizations on the campus supported the invitation to Duke.

While some object to Duke’s appearance because they see it as an affront to minorities, women and gays, leaders of many minority groups on campus, including the Black Student Union, have strongly supported Cerna’s plans to include Duke in the debate. They were quick to rally to Cerna’s defense. “We voted you in for a reason. Stick with what you’re doing and don’t be bullied,” declared Harold Caldwell, president of the American Indian Student Association.

Not all minority activists agreed. The anti-Duke protesters came in from out of town.

 Shortly before Tuesday’s Student Senate meeting, about eight members of the Bay Area group called the Coalition to Defense Affirmative Action By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), held a news conference vowing to try to block Duke’s appearance. The Northern California activists said the debate was a misguided event that would give Duke a platform to espouse his views. They were confronted by angry CSUN students who branded them as uninvited interlopers. “This is Cal State Northridge,” said Marlon Barbarin, 24, a sophomore political science major. “It’s pretty much up to the students here whether we want to have (Duke) or not.”

A Google search reveals that this conflict received extensive coverage in Los Angeles area newspapers, although much of the coverage framed it in the expected way as minority protesters vs. David Duke, rather than noticing the ironic and unexpected elements of the story. Minority students were inviting David Duke to call attention to the White supremacist implications of opposition to affirmative action. White students who supported a measure that would benefit Whites at the expense of minorities were opposing the invitation and actively sought to block the appearance because they saw the association with White supremacy as unfair to them. Many minority activists saw the minority students’ ploy as misguided, believing that giving Duke a forum would just strengthen the forces of White supremacy, not delegitimatize them.

Cross-posted at Race, Politics, Justice

less trust, moore verification: attention checks reveal errors in alabama poll data

Guest post by Nathan Seltzer

In the days following the publication of a Washington Post article that detailed allegations of sexual abuse against Roy Moore, Emerson College Polling released an election poll of Alabama voters that showed Moore maintaining a 10-point lead over his opponent Doug Jones, 55%/45%. This poll received sustained national press and influenced perceptions of the Alabama senate race since it was one of the first polls to be released after the Roy Moore allegations. The Emerson College Poll was conducted using survey data collected over the internet and by landline phone.

 In my working paper, “Less Trust, Moore Verification: Determining the Accuracy of Third-Party Data through an Innovative Use of Attention Checks,” I analyze raw data from this poll and find irregularities in the internet sample that might suggest that the respondents were not properly sampled by the data vendor that administered the survey, Opinion Access Corp., LLC.

As researchers increasingly rely on internet data vendors to acquire respondents for polls and surveys, I argue for the necessity of proactively verifying the accuracy of third-party data. In the paper, I detail how researchers can use survey “attention checks” to determine whether data vendors have provided samples that match their requested sampling frame. In the example below, I repurpose two pre-existing questionnaire items from the November 13 Emerson Poll to verify the accuracy of the sample provided by Opinion Access Corp.

Verifying Samples through A Priori Expectations of Variable Distributions

To verify whether the internet sample was comprised of valid Alabama respondents, I examined the joint frequency distribution of two overlapping geographic variables in the dataset: county of residence and US congressional district.

Alabama counties are nested within congressional districts, although there are several counties that overlap with two or three congressional districts (map here). As a result, we should expect that congressional districts are non-randomly distributed within counties. The a priori expectation would be that most counties should only have respondents in one congressional district. Additionally, we should expect respondents to correctly match their county and congressional district – there should be no ambiguity with exception of the possibility of minimal respondent error.

In the figure below (Figure 2 in the paper), I graph the joint frequency distribution of respondents by their counties and congressional districts for both the internet sample and the IVR phone sample. The rows of the graph correspond to county of residence while the columns correspond to the respondents’ specified congressional districts. The dark blue boxes represent clusters of one or more respondents, while the light grey boxes represent no respondents. Importantly, the red x-marks indicate valid responses that correctly match counties to congressional districts; all other cells in the heat map represent illogical and invalid county-district pairs.

Heat Map Depicting Joint Distribution of Counties of Residence and Congressional Districts for Respondents in the Internet and IVR Samples.

Notes: Correct Match refers to valid/logical matches for counties and congressional districts. All other cells represent invalid/illogical county-district pairs. Blue cells refer to whether one or more respondents indicated that they lived in the corresponding county and congressional district.

While the IVR phone sample matches our a priori expectations for how congressional districts should be distributed within counties, the internet sample does not. In fact, 117 out of the 324 internet respondents (36.1%) were unable to accurately match their county of residence to their US congressional district.

In Autauga county, for instance, which is in central Alabama and District #2, none of the respondents from the internet sample selected District #2. Instead, they indicated that their congressional district was either District #1, District #3, District #4, or District #7, all of which are incorrect.

It is unclear why respondents in the internet sample failed to correctly match their congressional districts to their county of residences. In the online questionnaire, respondents were provided a map that transposed congressional districts over county boundaries, and were then asked to indicate their congressional district. This should have been a simple task for respondents if they had knowledge of where they lived within their state of residency. To be sure, it is possible that the divergence in the joint distributions shown in the internet and IVR phone samples might have a practical explanation that is not easily inferred from the publicly-released survey methodology. But when internet error rate surpasses a third of all respondents, such an explanation seems implausible.

Less Trust, Moore Verification

Third-party internet panel vendors provide a cost-effective and time-efficient option for conducting survey research. However, data vendors often have aims and motives that do not align with academic researchers. By default, researchers should be skeptical of the accuracy of data provided by third parties. Ultimately, it is the researcher’s responsibility to determine the fidelity of the data they use in their analysis.

Although the aim of the paper is not to predict the outcome of an electoral contest, the removal of this poll from aggregate polling averages might indicate a tighter Alabama senate race than previously understood. Emerson College Polling released an additional poll that surveyed support for Roy Moore and Doug Jones in the Alabama senate race on November 28 that similarly relied on respondents acquired through Opinion Access Corp. If the same irregularities observed in the November 13 poll are present in the more recent poll, then political observers should interpret the results with the understanding that a substantial number of respondents interviewed might be invalidly included.

Nathan Seltzer is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a trainee at the Center for Demography and Ecology.

are adjuncts asked to write too many reference letters?

A Twitter exchange in response to my post saying that mediocre students deserve reference letters raised the problem of adjuncts’ reference-writing woes. Some adjuncts apparently get asked to write a lot more letters of reference than many full professors.  Some of the people who are being asked to write a lot of letters are contingent faculty who are already being overworked for poverty wages and it seems particularly unjust for them to be expected to shoulder this burden. My Twitter exchange was with an adjunct who teaches in five different departments and has a post doc besides, so I’m going to assume that the wage per course for this person is low. There are, of course, other adjuncts who are in regular non-contingent positions for reasonably good wages whose situation is somewhat different.

Writing a reference letter for an undergraduate takes at least 3 hours.

do B-average undergrads deserve letters of reference?

Once again there are discussions  about writing letters of reference in my social media. Some people seem to believe that getting a letter of reference is a privilege that only the very best students deserve, and that instructors ought to put a cap on how many students they will write letters for. Some of the arguments are based on managing instructors’ workloads. Coming from the pro-student side, there are also people who argue that letters of reference should  always be excellent letters that can really help a student’s career, which would seem to imply that letter-writers should decline to write at all if their letter would be merely tepid. (See below for samples.) This latter discourse also seems to imply that all students are excellent, or at least deserve to be written about as if they are excellent. So it is a real question: Do undergraduates who have failed to form close relations with faculty deserve letters of reference? Do mediocre undergraduates deserve letters of reference? My answer to both is, yes. 

an object lesson in good interviewing and public health

I have recently experienced an example of a persistent and rigorous interview that yielded an unexpected payoff. I somehow contracted a Giardia infection, a parasite usually associated with contaminated water. The first questions anyone knowledgeable asks are “Were you drinking out of streams?” and “Were you drinking well water?” because there is a problem in rural areas with contaminated water and wells can become contaminated, especially when there is a lot of flooding, as there was this summer. But I am a city person and only drink tap water. No, I haven’t been camping, I have not been drinking out of streams. I thought maybe there was a sick food service worker? Maybe contaminated tap water in a rural gas station in our trip to Duluth? Hard to know.

It turns out that Giardia is a reportable public health infection, so I got a call this week from a public health student.

exercising judgment in teaching about controversial issues

My department has run a number of workshops (organized by grad students) on “teaching about race.” They asked me to speak about what the rules are about what we can and cannot say in the classroom. I was pretty sure I knew the “rules” but asked our Provost for the official statement. Interestingly, there was none, but the question was referred to the Legal department. After a delay, Legal Affairs sent back an email citing Wisconsin state statutes and linking to some policy statements. I’ve pasted the original correspondence below.* First a student and I translated the legalese into English bullet points. Then I wrote an essay about how to think about the authority and ethical responsibility in teaching controversial topics. This was recirculated this fall and as I’ve gotten positive feedback about this, I decided to post it here, with a few more edits, in case it is helpful. There’s always more to say, and legitimate disagreement about how to handle some things. Feel free to use the comments to expand on these points.

bad behavior, secrecy, duplication, science

I’ve been mulling over Phil Cohen’s insistence that there is a serious problem with reviewer malfeasance, specifically in using the anonymity of peer review to prevent the publication of work that would encroach on the reviewer’s “turf.”  My first response was that Phil must be exaggerating, or in a bad field. But then I remembered that I do know for sure of one case in which someone I know did everything they could to block funding for and the success of a project with a similar research idea and methodology–but different data–to their own. And then, as I think about it, I know of another pocket of cases in which senior people published their own work on several related variations of topic X even though they had commented on and thus knew of prior working papers by graduate students on that topic and did not even have the grace to cite those prior papers, much less cede the turf to the people who had originated the research ideas. Is this kind of behavior as common as Phil seems to think it is? And, if so, what ought we to do about it?

on sharing work in progress and anonymity

I got involved in a debate over at orgtheory about the pluses and minuses of putting working papers on line at SocArXiv (or elsewhere). That debate was tangled up with a variety of issues around the proposal to require public posting of papers that win (or are submitted to) section paper award competitions.

In this post I want to avoid that tangle of other issues and open discussion/debate on the narrower question of whether the discipline of sociology as a field should do all it can to move toward the model of other fields, where working papers are routinely placed on public archives before they go through peer review for ultimate publication.

The sociology model as it is generally practiced involves writing a paper, presenting it at conferences and circulating drafts of it around for a year or more, submitting it to a journal, going through several iterations of rejections and R&Rs, and finally getting it published maybe 4 or 5 years after it the work was originally done. In the meantime, some people (those you were at conferences with or to whom you sent the paper) know about the work, while others working in the same area may not know about it and thus will not cite it or be influenced by it, junior scholars worry that their work will be scooped by a more senior person who gets the idea from a circulating PDF or as an anonymous reviewer, and knowledge as a whole bogs down.

The alternative model practiced in many fields is: (1) Do the work and present it at conferences as the work evolves.  Be known as the person/team working on problem X because you have talked about it at multiple conferences. (2) Post a working paper on ArXiv or SSRN etc. as soon as you think  you have something to report. (3) Other people cite and debate your work based on the ArXiv or SSRN etc version. If it is wrong it gets called out and fixed. If it is novel and correct, you get invited to more conferences to discuss it and you learn about the work others are doing in the same field. (4) Your paper slogs its way through peer review and ultimately gets published; then you link to the published version from the working paper site. 

stata: roll your own palettes

I realize all the cool kids have switched to R, but if you still work with Stata, you may be interested in some routines I worked up to generate color and line pattern palettes and customize graphs fairly easily with macros and loops. This is useful to me because I am generating line graphs showing the trends for 17 different offense groups. Some preliminary tricks, then the code.