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…
Continue reading →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,”…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →Yesterday the American Statistical Association (that’s right, a different ASA) released a “Statement on Statistical Significance and P-values.” It’s a thoughtful consideration of the issue, and it even includes 21 commentaries right off the bat, sort of a prepackaged colloquium to nerd out over. FiveThirtyEight did a nice little article on the statement, and I…
Continue reading →Like it or not, social media is a pervasive form of communication and a part of the way that we live now. Social media is an important way to promote one’s research and publications or a way to communicate with students. Inside Higher Ed recently wrote about a paper being presented at Information and Telecommunications…
Continue reading →This is a guest Post by Stephen Sweet at Ithaca College on his Teaching Sociology article, “How Departments Can Respond to the Changing Popularity of the Sociology Major,” which is based on his 2015 Hans O. Mauksch Address. Sociology is losing a popularity contest. True, there are now more sociology majors but there are also…
Continue reading →The Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA) (of which ASA is a governing member), in conjunction with the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, submitted comments on the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) for the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects or the “Common Rule.” Overall, the comments…
Continue reading →Of interest to authors, editors, and publishers alike . . . A new post from the Society for Scholarly Publishing’s Scholarly Kitchen blog discusses a new JAMA article on the Impact Factor denominator and its effect on journal rankings.
Continue reading →