Arne L. Kalleberg, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Explaining the astonishing results in the 2016 presidential election will undoubtedly keep social scientists busy for a long time. While the eventual consequences of the election are yet to be seen, it is clear that sociologists have tremendous challenges ahead. At the same time, there…

Richard Arum and Joan Malczewski As educators, our concerns start with our students. Our higher education work is embedded deeply in communities heavily populated by immigrants and with diverse groups of students including aspiring teachers who plan to dedicate their lives to serving youth in high–need, urban public schools. In these settings, large numbers of…

Last year, ASA focused on why you #lovesociology. This year we would like to know how you are #doingsociology. What are you doing as a sociologist? Being a sociologist is about doing sociology. On the newly designed ASA website, there is a section on the homepage, titled “What Sociologists Do,” which highlights the important and…

Following another shooting of an unarmed black man by an officer of the law, sociologists took to social media to ask “What can we do?”. Whether debating topics on social media, discussing Black Lives Matter and racial bias and police shootings in blog posts (here and here), addressing racial  issues in the media, or any…

The American Sociological Association (ASA) issued a press release today applauding the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling today in the affirmative action case Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. The judgement allows the university to continue using race as a factor in admissions decisions. “This ruling is an important victory for diversity in higher education,”…

This post is from Karen Gray Edwards, ASA Director of Publications and Membership In February, ASA became aware that ASA-owned journal content (and that of virtually all scholarly journals published by JSTOR, SAGE, Elsevier and other major journal publishers) had been illegally downloaded and made freely available through “Sci-Hub.” Elsevier initially led the legal fight…

This is a guest post by Syed Ali and Philip Cohen, Contexts co-editors. Contexts Magazine’s Ethnography Forum A few months ago, the ASA Council asked us if we’d be interested in organizing a forum on “best practices” in ethnography in response to recent highly critical press. Council asked that this not be more critique, but…

This is a guest post by Freeden Oeur at Tufts University on his Socius article, “Recognizing Dignity: Young Black Men Growing Up in an Era of Surveillance.” You can read more Socius articles at http://srd.sagepub.com/. Recognizing Dignity One finding animates studies of life in poor urban communities: young men yearn for respect, or the admiration and deference…