By Karen Sternheimer
I had a really cool social studies teacher in high school, and he taught a sociology class as an elective. I didn’t take it. Why?
It could have been the age-old “didn’t fit my schedule” or someone mentioned it was “hard.” I took his psychology class instead, maybe because I thought I knew something about psychology (I didn’t) or thought it might be easy (it wasn’t).
Continue reading “Getting into Sociology: Advice for High School Students”
By Karen Sternheimer
You have probably seen news of protests in Europe about overtourism—locals upset about their hometowns being overrun with crowds, often pricing them out of local housing markets. Cities like Barcelona, Florence, Venice, and Paris have experienced problems with overwhelming summer crowds.
While the rebound after the COVID shutdowns of 2020 kept people from traveling for a year or more is part of the explanation, we can use our sociological imagination to think more deeply about why certain places draw crowds.
Continue reading “Overtourism: Revisiting the Sacred and Profane”
By Karen Sternheimer
During a trip to Milan, one of the first places I visited was the Cimitero Monumentale, a cemetery famous for its ornate sculptures. We noticed a lot of funeral homes on our walk to this famous landmark, and flowers for sale for visitors to place on graves. This wasn’t surprising. But what was surprising were the many ads for funeral services on street signs in other parts of town.
The signs caught me a bit off guard, but they shouldn’t have. Italy’s population is aging; nearly a quarter of Italians are 65 or older (by contrast, only about 17 percent of the U.S. population is 65 or older). Funerals are a growing business.
Continue reading “Are we Being Replaced? Fertility, Mortality, and Demography”
By Karen Sternheimer
This year has been particularly challenging for the elderly people in my neighborhood, or I should say my former—and hopefully future—neighborhood. The Los Angeles firestorm earlier this year wiped out more than 16,000 structures, including my own. It also destroyed my 87-year-old mother-in-law’s home of 60 years.
While it’s impossible to know exactly how many people aged 65 or older lost their homes, we do know that older people were more likely to die as the result of the fires. Of the 30 deaths listed on the Los Angeles County Coroner’s website, 23—nearly 77 percent of victims—were 65 or older. Mobility issues can make evacuation more difficult, especially for people who don’t drive.
Continue reading “Magnified Trauma: Losing Your Home While Elderly”
By Karen Sternheimer
Sociologists have long studied marriage and relationships, asking big-picture questions about how relationships reflect changing social structure, shifts in gender and power, and economic factors. Sociologists are also interested in interpersonal experiences, such as how do people make meaning of love and relationships? How is love more than just a private feeling but a public issue?
We know that strong relationships with family and friends are good for longevity and overall health, with one study finding that strong social ties is as important as healthy eating and active living for overall health. This is more than just interesting intellectually—we all likely want to cultivate strong relationships for both our short-term and long-term happiness. But it can be easier said than done, especially if we are not in social situations where we might meet new people (such as, after we are no longer students or no longer have children who are students).
By Karen Sternheimer
Recently my credit card fell out of a zipped lining in my handheld water bottle while running. I don’t usually carry a credit card for a run but planned on stopping for a breakfast burrito as a special treat when I was done. I hadn’t been to the restaurant before and wasn’t sure that they accepted Apple Pay (they did), so I thought best to have the actual card with me just in case.
I retraced my steps to no avail, it was gone. A lost credit card is easy enough to remedy. I went to the app and clicked that it was lost. It was inactivated and a new one would be mailed in 5-7 days.
This shouldn’t be a major crisis, especially after losing my home and most of my possessions in a wildfire a few months earlier. But it really upset me, and I used my sociological imagination to unpack why. The loss of a central artifact in our consumer culture sheds light on the role of consumption itself.
Continue reading “The Drama of a Lost Credit Card: Living in a Culture of Consumption”
By Karen Sternheimer
Many of our social interactions are guided by unwritten rules. But sometimes we don’t know what to say when someone experiences a profound loss, or the words others use in attempt to provide comfort can miss the mark.
Writing in the nineteenth century, sociologist Émile Durkheim described anomie as a breakdown of social rules during times of rapid change. While he was focused on macro-level changes, and how we communicate about loss is more micro-level, we can borrow his insights. After all, in the U.S. we tend to avoid talking about death and thus might not know how to do so even if we want to.
Continue reading “Unwritten Rules: What to Say (and What Not to Say) to Someone Dealing with Loss”
By Karen Sternheimer
I currently live about a block away from a large public high school. Students walk by sporting their school merch, including hats, t-shirts, and sweatshirts. During track meets, in addition to starter pistols, you can hear a wave of cheering from an apparently large crowd. They seem to have “school spirit.”
This, along with Michael Messner’s new book, The High School: Sports, Spirit, and Citizens 1903-2024, got me thinking about the concept of “school spirit” and why schools work so hard to cultivate it among students and communities. It harkened back memories of our high school cheerleaders’ ubiquitous chant at football games:
Yes, yes, yes, we do; we’ve got spirit, how about you?
The crowd was supposed to respond in kind. But why?
Continue reading “High School and the Sports Spirit Complex”
By Karen Sternheimer
Michael Messner’s new book, The High School: Sports, Spirit & Citizens, 1903-2024 is a great example of how artifacts of everyday life can become data for sociological analysis. As a scholar of gender and sports, Messner realized that yearbooks serve as a window to view past constructions of both sports and gender.
His own high school, Salinas High School, seemed like a natural fit, as he had about 30 years of books—not just his own, because his father served as a coach for nearly 30 years and other family members attended, he had decades of books. The book blends the author’s memories (and occasionally his niece’s reflections, who attended more recently) with content analysis of the number of pages spent on boys’ sports compared with girls’ sports.
Continue reading “The High School: An Analysis of Yearbooks”
By Karen Sternheimer
A few months ago, I wrote about how losing a home is not just about losing one’s place to live, but losing a community and the people within it. People around us can shape our daily rhythms and feelings of connectedness to place. Sociologists study the importance of communities, most notably how they are not just the places in which our everyday lives take place, but provide access to opportunities, economic contexts, and impact our health.
Continue reading “On the Disappearance of Community, Part 2”