Posted in Gender, Holidays, The Electronic Age, tagged Academic Regalia, Halloween, Hogwarts, Memoirs of a SLACer, Sexy Costumes on October 31, 2014|
If you receive a last-minute invitation to a Halloween costume tonight and you feel the need to find a “sexy” costume, remember that there is nothing sexier than academic regalia! Alternatively, you could print off the logo for your favorite Hogwarts house, grab a stick from the yard, and go as a wizard. If you own one of these expensive costumes you may as well wear it more than a few times a year!
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Posted in Gender, Sexuality, tagged Halloween, Memoirs of a SLACer, Sexy Halloween Costumes, The Hawkeye Initiative on October 23, 2014| 2 Comments »
Time is running out to send your Halloween cards and get your Halloween costume. For women, the choices for pre-made costumes range from “sexy maid” to “sexy map.” (I was trying to be as ridiculous as possible with that last suggestion, but…) These costumes are universally ridiculous, but in order for men to realize this they apparently need to try them on. It is interesting that in their discussions of how ridiculous these “sexy” costumes are, the men in the video below still manage to make a number of approving comments about how women would look in them. Sort of like if comic book artists responded to the Hawkeye Initiative by thinking, “Hawkeye looks ridiculous in that pose! But if he had breasts…”
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Posted in Race, Teaching Tricks, The Electronic Age, TV Time, tagged Memoirs of a SLACer, PBS, Race in America, Slate, Teaching About Race, The Whiteness Project on October 19, 2014|
Over the years I’ve had a number of “good” classes of students, but I can’t recall a good class conversation about race. This is a problem, because without the ability to think about the ways that people understand race it is harder to tear those understandings down and introduce a sociological perspective (even if the sociological perspective is sometimes debated). The Whiteness Project, A new series from PBS, and related videos online, provide a possible solution to these problems. As the “About” section on the webpage notes:
The Whiteness Project is a multiplatform investigation into how Americans who identify as “white” experience their ethnicity.
The project is conducting 1,000 interviews with white people from all walks of life and localities in which they are asked about their relationship to, and their understanding of, their own whiteness. It also includes data drawn from a variety of sources that highlights some quantitative aspects of what it means to be a white American.
This is great for the classroom because it allows instructors to show a brief video clip and then discuss the ideas it contains, the likely origins of those ideas, and sociological responses. Essentially, it shifts the burden of revealing the types of ideas that many white Americans hold from students to video clips. Take Jason, for instance, who says that he has not received any benefits from being white an discusses blacks blaming problems that have long-since been solved (you know, like slavery and discrimination) for their current situations. Or Harold, who believes that whites are the ones who suffer from discrimination today.
Using these videos as a starting point will allow students to do the work of critiquing the ideas present from a sociological perspective. I’m looking forward to trying it out.
Via Slate
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Posted in The Ivory Tower, The Publication Gauntlet, tagged American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Mark Granovetter, Memoirs of a SLACer, Scatterplot, Shamus Khan, The Strength of Weak Ties on October 14, 2014|
In keeping with the theme of the early struggles of now-famous sociologists, Shamus has a post at Scatterplot featuring Mark Granovetter’s rejection letter and reviews from ASR for his paper on the strength of weak ties, then called “Alienation Reconsidered: The Strength of Weak Ties.” As Granovetter notes in Shamus’s post, the framing changed significantly between the version that was rejected by ASR and the version that was accepted by AJS.
Posted in Conference Attendance, Job Market, Sociology Job Market, The Ivory Tower, The Publication Gauntlet, The State of Sociology, tagged Academia, Academic Job Market, Adjunct Teaching, Erving Goffman, Higher Education, Howard Becker, Memoirs of a SLACer, Sociology on October 12, 2014| 1 Comment »
The history of the sociology job market contains some interesting peculiarities. For example, George Herbert Mead received an M.A. in philosophy from Harvard and then went to Germany to work on his Ph.D. Before his dissertation was completed, he accepted a faculty position at the University of Michigan where he taught philosophy and psychology before later following John Dewey to the University of Chicago. He never completed his Ph.D. (Imagine the field day that a certain job site would have with his hiring today!) It was, I suppose, a different time. (A certain job site does have a field day with discussions of full professors whom it is argued couldn’t get a tenure-track position in today’s market with their current records.) The cases of Howie Becker and Erving Goffman show that not all of the big names in sociology had such an easy time on the job market while reinforcing how different things were back then.
At ASA in San Francisco this year, Howie Becker was the discussant on one of the “Young Ethnographer” panels (the one without Alice Goffman). About the papers, he said something along the lines of “How am I supposed to talk about such different papers at the same time” and then moved on to a discussion of his belief that the best ethnographic work (he actually stated that he prefers the term “field work”) is typically conducted by young people in graduate school who have the benefit of time.* Early in his career, he and his fellow University of Chicago graduate Erving Goffman (if this had been the session with Alice Goffman he could have brought things full-circle…) were unable to find work. So they conducted research.
According to Wikipedia (which has incorrect information about Mead’s education and, thus, may or may not be a reliable source of information on the biographies of sociologists), after completing his Ph.D. Becker conducted research at the Institute for Juvenile Research, in a postdoc at the University of Illinois, and as a research associate at Stanford before starting as a faculty member at Northwestern. Although things might not have seemed too dire because he received his Ph.D. when he was only 23, it was over ten years before Becker started what today would probably be considered his official career. Goffman, meanwhile, worked as a research associate at the University of Chicago and then for the National Institute for Mental Health before beginning as a faculty member at Berkeley.
Becker’s point in discussing the job market woes that he and Goffman experienced at ASA this year was that they both relished the opportunity to focus on research during those years, even as their friends took pity on them. My point in discussing them is to highlight the evolution of job market pathways in the intervening years. While a candidate today might be able to get a postdoc, the increasing reliance on adjunct labor means that the prospects for somebody without a tenure-track job who wants to stay in academia are much more likely to include cobbling together a poverty-level salary from various adjunct positions than earning a comfortable living conducting research. The outcomes of these pathways are also clear, since adjunct teaching leaves little time for building a publication record that will result in an eventual tenure-track job.
Despite what might have been perceived by their friends as early-career stumbles, Becker and Goffman went on to have illustrious careers in sociology and made large contributions to the discipline. How many similar contributions does the current opportunity structure within academia deprive us of?
*Later in his career, he claimed that he found time for field work by being a bad departmental citizen. It is best that we don’t mention the advice that he solicited on this topic from a few esteemed audience members.
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Posted in Rulz for Undergradz, Sage Advice, Teaching Tricks, tagged Graduate Admissions, Internships, Letters of Recommendation, Memoirs of a SLACer, Personal Statements, Scholarships, Writing Letters of Recommendation on October 5, 2014|
Current and former students often ask me to write them letters of recommendation for various things and I typically say yes. As I’ve said in the past, when writing these letters it is helpful to know what students are saying in any required statements so that I can ensure my own statements support those points. The only problem with this is that students often provide me with these materials after they have been submitted to the organization in question, even though I would classify the quality of their work in these statements as rough at best.
One might think that students who are attempting to obtain an internship, scholarship, or entrance to a graduate program might put more effort into the required personal statements than they would a brief class assignment, but this does not appear to be the case. This is not entirely the fault of students, since most of them are not trained in this form of writing and they might not feel like they have a go-to person to answer their questions (unlike a class assignment). Nevertheless, they should still assume that things like proofreading and the use of paragraphs and specific examples will strengthen their arguments that they should receive an internship, scholarship, or entrance to a graduate program.
As a writer of letters of recommendation, low-quality personal statements also put me in a difficult position. Obviously, I want to support my students and help them become successful. On the other hand, it is difficult to make a strong argument that a student was among my best or was a good writer or whatever other seemingly-arbitrary characteristics institutions say they care about when the student’s personal statement looks like it was written in fifteen minutes and then edited by a cat sitting on the student’s keyboard. In the future, I might need to request that in the future students provide me with a draft of their personal statements and allow me to help guide them through the process of revising and editing it as a condition of writing a recommendation.
I might not have the code that will allow all of their applications to be successful, but I’ve got to be a better editor than their cats.
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Posted in Teaching Tricks, The Electronic Age, Tracking the Transition, tagged E-mail Etiquette, E-mail Signatures, Memoirs of a SLACer, Professional Titles on October 2, 2014|
Over four years ago, I discussed my move away from signing e-mails with my first name in grad school but that I hadn’t settled on a replacement since starting as an assistant professor, stating: “My current unsatisfactory practice has been to let my e-mail signature, which includes my full name and contact information, stand in as a closing and signature, but this leaves my e-mails feeling unfinished.” This year, I decided that needed to change.
At the beginning of the semester I decided to start signing e-mail to students “Professor Smith.” In some ways, my new institution made this easier because the norm on campus is for students to call faculty “Professor,” whereas there was no strong norm at my previous institution. My hope is that this will also help students think about professionalism in the e-mails that they send me, maybe even leading to things like complete sentences and the use of the subject line. If nothing else, at least my e-mails feel complete.
Memoirs of a SLACer 