Hard times in San Francisco

As a friend noted last week, the presence of sociologists from all over the world descending upon San Francisco to hang out in the Hilton and discuss the conference theme of “Hard Times” while the homeless begged outside helped put things in perspective. Because of that, I was struck by Ana Velitchkova’s post at Mobilizing Ideas where she discusses her stay in the Tenderloin district, both a few blocks and worlds away from the conference hotel. She writes, in part:

The hotel reviews depict the place as located in an area where homeless people, drunks, and drug addicts loiter. Some reviewers even report bed bugs, which horrifies a San Francisco friend of mine most of all. While waiting for my room to be ready−I was being treated to a brand new bed [a sigh of relief!]−the manager, who is also a concierge, repairs guy, and anything else that he needs to be, regretfully informs me that “My only problem is the homeless and the drug dealers in front”. Indeed, the place isn’t that bad. The room is large and clean (I am not a fan of the smell of the cleaning products used but I can live with that for a few days, I try to convince myself). It has a bathroom en suite, free Internet, and coffee 24 hours: the traveler’s essentials.

The first morning challenges my poise though. One of the cute little conference outfits I had been so happy to pile in my suitcase makes me feel uneasy when I leave the hotel and walk the one block to Mason street, which separates the “good” part from the “bad” part of the neighborhood. The dark-blue business-casual dress matched with a white cardigan, red flats, and nylons, contrasts flashingly with the baggy jeans, tank tops, and sports jackets of the residents hanging out in the neighborhood. After eyeing me continuously, one man greets me with an exclamation, after I pass by him: “Good morning!” I barely have a chance to respond with a confused “Good morning” back, when a woman looks me over and mumbles something disapprovingly incomprehensible. I try to breathe normally and maintain a fast and steady stride as I make my way through the block. Beyond Mason street, I feel a tension release and realize my body had internalized a sense of fear of the downtrodden. Then, I start to wonder: ‘Who is really more in danger, they or I?’ (But notice the distinction this statement already implies.)

Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing, then consider the ASA’s position (WARNING! Read only the first post on that page, read nothing else! Trust me!) on the difficulty of making the conference more financially accessible even for faculty members and spend some time thinking about hard times.

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The #1 threat to the social sciences is…

Bill O’Reilly!

Lately, some of my Facebook friends have been posting a link to Herbert Gans’s 2002 entreaty to become public sociologists. In it, Gans states that anybody can become a public sociolgist but cautions that “Audiences are the ultimate gate keeper” and that “public intellectuals must be willing to speak to topics that interest them, and with frames and values that are comprehensible and acceptable to them.”

The above photo, in which a bookstore’s Social Science section (which consisted of one shelf) has been overrun by Bill O’Reilly, indicates that we might not be doing the best job of this. The Social Sciences section was next to the politics section, so it is likely that these books overflowed from there (although I would argue that they don’t belong there, either!) but I couldn’t find a single book on this shelf that was actually based on social science research. The next shelf was related to crime and was filled mostly with the “true crime” genre.

I think that Nathan Palmer’s recent reminder that, for our students, we are the public face of sociology is important, but we still appear to be failing Gans. If none of sociology’s best sellers appear in a bookstore in a rural area of the country and people’s idea of sociology itself is derived from Sudhir Venkatesh’s appearance on the Colbert Report, then maybe we are too focused on what our colleagues think of our work and not focused enough on what our neighbors think of it.

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American conference, American priorities?

At the recent annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in New York, the ASA made a statement that others should “Keep Calm and Fund Sociology,” as our purple conference bags noted. The continued funding of sociological research is certainly important, as successful efforts to deny NSF funding to political science make clear. Nevertheless, maybe the ASA should have used the approach of the British Sociological Association, which produced a video at its own annual meeting (available below) showing all of the ways why it is important to commit sociology. The video shows why sociology is important, which will hopefully lead to continued funding. It also makes me want to join the BSA.

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The defensive turn

One of the things I try to do in my sociology courses is disrupt students’ normal way of looking at the world to show them that things are often not as simple as they seem. From this perspective, one of the most interesting things about the Zimmerman trial to me was his claim that he was defending himself after he actively pursued Trayvon Martin. As President Obama noted in his recent speech on the case, the idea of Stand Your Ground laws are complicated by the difficulty of telling who is on the offensive and who is on the defensive. Obama stated:

For those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these ‘‘stand your ground’’ laws, I just ask people to consider if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman, who had followed him in a car, because he felt threatened? And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.

While my fighting experience is limited to being punched twice in the face (on separate occasions), it seems that in most fights both parties are on both offense and defense. In this case, the fight between Martin and Zimmerman could have easily started because Martin felt threatened by the man who followed him first in his truck and then on foot. In the event that somebody is pursuing you, defending yourself seems like a reasonable course of action. As soon as the fight started, though, Martin’s defense would be perceived by Zimmerman as offense and Zimmerman may have felt that he was defending himself. The cliche that the best defense is a good offense is based on the complicated interplay in situations like this.

The idea that fights like this are either/or affairs where one person is attacking and the other may be “standing his ground” could use a good dose of disruption. Situations like these are the perfect time to commit sociology for the greater good.

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Distortion in public sociology

At the end of my last post, I noted that the difficulties I faced writing an entry for an academic encyclopedia are likely to be shared by sociologists attempting to reach a broader audience. The lack of peer review* in this type of work also means that there is a greater possibility for distortion**, as Philip N. Cohen highlights when critiquing W. Bradford Wilcox’s recent article about fatherhood at Slate. The greatest danger with these types of articles that are aimed at a broader audience is probably not deliberate distortion but the type of subtle distortion that occurs when we try to remove the context and subtlety from the research we discuss.

*Incidentally, I’ve been told that the experience of writing for Contexts is similar, though the fact that Contexts articles are peer-reviewed hopefully reduces the likelihood of distortion.

**Of course, the recent controversy surrounding Mark Regnerus’s work demonstrates that the possibility for distortion exists within peer-reviewed work as well.

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Encyclopedic

I recently wrote an academic encyclopedia entry for my area of specialization; it was strange. The first reason for strangeness is that I associate writing encyclopedia entries with graduate school. Several of my graduate student colleagues wrote encyclopedia entries that had been passed on to them by professors – sometimes these professors coauthored the entries and sometimes they did not. This association is likely faulty – I’m sure that many professors, even those at my graduate institution, have written encyclopedia entries that I am not aware of since they aren’t likely to be publicized much – but it still made the thought of writing one myself seem strange.

This association was easily overcome by the fact that writing the entry would be relatively easy since it in my area of expertise and it would count as a form of the “evidence of scholarly activity” my school wants to see; the second was more difficult. The instructions and sample encyclopedia entry made it clear that I was to write with no citations in an authoritative tone. As an academic, the first of these requirements was difficult. After years of citing everything and instructing my students to do the same, I had a hard time writing about research findings without the context provided by authors and dates.  As a sociologist, the practice of writing in an authoritative tone was also difficult. I’ve read a number of psychological studies where the authors state that their findings “prove” a hypothesis while sociologists are more likely to say that their findings “demonstrate” something. For the encyclopedia entry, though, I had to write as if the findings by one or two groups of researchers could be taken as fact. I attempted to overcome this as much as possible by mentioning the context in which studies were conducted (e.g., “a nationally representative sample” or “a study of women in their 30s”).

In the end, I think that the difficulties I experienced were similar to the obstacles sociologists face when communicating with the general public. We like to emphasize the contexts in which research was conducted in order to recognize the diversity of the social world. This diversity also prevents us from making broad declarative statements regarding the generalizability of our findings. The public, or at least the media that typically exposes the public to our research, likes short, easily digestible statements (possibly in bullet-point form). Finding a comfortable middle ground is a challenge that we have to face if we want to reach beyond the ivory tower.

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Sociology on the rise?

In the past few weeks, there have been two relatively high-profile attacks on sociology (recognizing, of course, that anything reaching beyond the walls of sociology departments is relatively high-profile). In the first, N+1 published an article claiming that there is “too much sociology” because everybody already sees the world sociologically. In the second, Justin Trudeau’s argued that it is necessary to examine the root causes of problems like terrorism, prompting Stephen Harper, Canada’s Prime Minister, to state, “This is not a time to commit sociology, if I can use an expression [that I just made up].”

Beyond potentially causing the ASA to shut down its website, I see these attacks as a positive sign for sociology. In my experience, lots of sociologists wish that policymakers would pay more attention to our ideas while lots of people in the general public have no idea what sociology is. (Admit it, half of your family members have jokingly requested that you don’t psychoanalyze them.) The fact that some, even some in positions of power, are criticizing sociological ideas means that they are at least vaguely familiar with sociological ideas. That seems like progress to me.

*The buttons in the picture above are available for sale at this website. According to their creator, all proceeds will be donated to the Canadian Sociological Association’s student research award. I have already ordered one, adding to my growing collection of sociological buttons.

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Cultural scripts fail me

Cultural scripts from movies, TV shows, and video games are often blamed for contributing to things like murders and school shootings.  When people do heroic things, though, I don’t remember seeing these behaviors linked to cultural scripts.  For example, in the recent spate of heroic celebrity behavior (Ew.com reports: “First Ryan Gosling broke up a street-fight. Then Kate Winslet rescued Richard Branson’s mother. Now, completing this week’s hat trick of celebrity heroism, Brad Pitt has reportedly saved an extra from being trampled on the set of World War Z.“) I haven’t seen anybody suggest that these behaviors are learned through watching movies (or being paid to act heroically in said movies).  Events that transpired over the summer, however, suggest that I have not picked up on these cultural scripts.

To give one example, I was leaving a store one summer afternoon when I heard a woman yell to stop a man who had stolen her purse out of her shopping cart as she put her purchases into her car.  The man, who was likely in his late teens or early twenties, ran past me on the other side of my car and across the parking lot.  Rather than chasing after him I stood watching him run and then started walking in his direction considering whether, if I started running, I would be able to catch him before he got to the road or wherever he was going.  Meanwhile, another man did chase after him until he got into an SUV with three other men that had been waiting in the parking lot.  Another man followed them, recording their license plate number and reporting it to the police.  Shortly afterward, a detective arrived at the scene of the crime and reported that they had been apprehended.  In sum, while I did not act heroically, several others did, resulting in a positive resolution to the situation.

This situation led me to wonder if I would act differently in a similar situation.  More than that, though, I wondered what I would have done if I had actually caught the perpetrator.  Tackling somebody in a parking lot does not sound like a good idea.  At any rate, I wonder if my failure to follow cultural scripts in one situation makes me less likely to follow cultural scripts in other situations.  Maybe I am less likely to act heroically but also less likely to act violently.  I also wonder if being trained as sociologists makes us more likely to recognize cultural scripts but less likely to follow them.

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Forgetting what they’ve learned

A recent double post by Nathan Palmer at Scatterplot and The Sociology Source (which shows up in my RSS reader as “Blog”) tackles the issue of making social facts understandable for students.  As Palmer states:

I tell my class to imagine that I have just handed back their graded tests for them to review. I tell them that the class average was a 72%. This, I tell them, is an empirical social fact. The trend or in this case the average for the entire class was 72%.

Then I ask them, “would it make sense if one of you told me ‘the average can’t be a 72% because I got a 96% on my test’?” They laugh at the ridiculousness of this question. “Well when I present to you empirical social facts and you say to me ‘well I know this one guy who doesn’t do what your research says’ or ‘well that’s not true in my experience, so your social fact must be wrong’ you are basically arguing that because you got a 96% the class average can’t be a 72%” Many heads nodding in unison. They get it.

This seems like an excellent way to make this point, given the number of students who have told me that research findings aren’t “true” because they had different experiences.  It reminded me, however, of something else I encountered recently – former sociology students who have forgotten what they learned about social life as a result of the dreaded “real world.”

It seems that the social facts we teach students can be overcome by a few years of job experience.  Former sociology students who gained an in-depth understanding of the long-standing discrimination against blacks, for example, may claim that they are the victims of “reverse discrimination” when they can’t find a job in a recession.  Similarly, knowledge of the burden of the second shift may be overcome by a man who finds that his wife will do the laundry herself if he waits long enough.

While students in our classrooms seem to grasp the concepts we teach, these concepts are often counter to the stereotypical norms of our society.  Once they get it, the larger question becomes how we can get them to keep it.

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Small fish in a small pond

After a few interactions with my school’s media relations people I’ve concluded that if you are interested in serving as a source for the media (local or otherwise) but you are a small fish in terms of research productivity you are probably much better off making your home in a small pond where even your most insignificant publications and presentations will get the attention of the media relations folks.

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