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About the Everyday Sociology Blog
What if sociologists ran the world?
Okay, that’s probably not going to happen any time soon, but what if they commented on everything from politics, religion, race, and inequality to pop culture on a colorful, fun, website?
That’s more like it.
Welcome to Everydaysociologyblog.com, a site that features interesting, informative, and most of all entertaining commentary from sociologists around the United States. Come to this site regularly to get a sociological take on what is happening in the news (and on what should be in the news).
Although this site was created primarily for people taking or teaching classes in sociology, we are all really students of sociology, aren’t we? Whether we know it or not, we all generate ideas about social groups, about why things happen and about what should be done to address some of the challenges our society faces (like terrorism, health care and education). Issues like war and peace, gay rights, and what is on the news are things that many people try and make sense of.
We are trying to figure this stuff out too, and the many tools that sociology offers will help us to do so. These tools are not magic wands or secret codes—in fact, we want to share them with you to so we can all have a deeper and richer understanding of the world around us.
So here’s what you can expect from this site:
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We promise to stay on top of current events and be as relevant as people over 25 with Ph.D.s possibly can be.
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We will avoid using jargon and terms that you actually need a Ph.D. to understand (although personally I think even people with Ph.D.s sometimes just pretend to understand).
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And most of all, we will keep things interesting—all of the posts on this site will pass the “so what?” test that some academic research frankly does not.
Sociology is a very diverse field, and our contributors have a wide variety of interests. You will see discussions of inequality, immigration, mental health, race, religion, gender, and other topics from a wide variety of perspectives. To bring in fresh ideas, we will also periodically have guest contributors.
And we will do more than lecture you. Even though most of us are professors who teach regularly, this site will be more of a conversation than a class. Okay, there might be some charts and graphs occasionally, but we promise there won’t be a test. We are going to do our best to help these ideas come to life through pictures and streaming video. We also might write a little about our lives to bring some of the basics of sociology to life, but we promise—no endless blog rambling about what we had for dinner or random thoughts about why the cat hates the guy who lives next door.
You might be wondering—where do you fit in with all this? What about what you think? This site will present a variety of ideas and viewpoints, and you may not agree with some of them. That’s okay. In fact, sometimes we might purposefully play devil’s advocate.
We invite you to join in the sociological conversation. Remember, the point of this site is to learn more about how sociology helps us understand everyday life, not to vent! Quality control is really important to us, so you can be sure when you visit you won’t have to sift through a lot of junk.
So, welcome! We invite you to visit regularly and share your sociological imagination with the world.
Karen Sternheimer
Editor
About the Authors
Karen Sternheimer
Lead Writer & Editor
Karen Sternheimer teaches in the sociology department at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses primarily on moral panics, youth and popular culture. Her commentary has been published in the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and the San Jose Mercury News. She has appeared on CNN, FOX, MSNBC, ABC, The History Channel, and numerous radio programs. Editor of the Everyday Sociology Reader (W.W. Norton, 2010) and Childhood in American Society: A Reader (Allyn & Bacon, 2009), she is also the author of The Social Scientist’s Soapbox: Adventures in Writing Public Sociology (Routledge, 2018), Pop Culture Panics: How Moral Crusaders Construct Meanings of Deviance and Delinquency (Routledge, 2015), Celebrity Culture and the American Dream: Stardom and Social Mobility, Second Edition (Routledge, 2015), Connecting Social Problems and Popular Culture: Why Media is not the Answer (Routledge, 2013), Kids These Days: Facts and Fictions about Today’s Youth (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006) and It’s Not the Media: The Truth about Pop Culture’s Influence on Children (Westview, 2003).
Angelique Harris
Writer
Dr. Angelique Harris is Founding Director of the Center for Gender and Sexualities Studies and the Gender and Sexualities Studies Program and is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Social and Cultural Sciences at Marquette University. Her research examines social problems and issues within marginalized communities, primarily focusing on the experiences of women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ communities. Her research and teaching interests include the sociology of health and illness, race and ethnicity, gender and sexualities, sociology of religion, urban studies, media studies, and social movements. Along with dozens of articles and book chapters, Dr. Harris has authored and co-authored several books on LGBTQ+ communities of color, including AIDS, Sexuality, and the Black Church: Making the Wounded Whole and the Intersection of Race and Sexuality book series.
Colby King
Writer
Colby King teaches and studies urban sociology, social stratification and inequality, social class, work, and strategies for supporting working-class and first-generation college students. Dr. King has published research on DIY place branding in deindustrialized cities, adapting AudaCity (an urban board game which he co-created) as an active-learning exercise, and efforts to support development of students’ social and cultural capital, as well as TRAILS teaching resources. In 2014, Dr. King organized Class Beyond the Classroom, an organization of BSU faculty and staff who support working-class and first-generation college students at BSU. He has served as a member of the Steering Committee for the Working-Class Studies Association and the American Sociological Association’s Task Force on First-Generation and Working-Class People in Sociology, and he is a co-PI for the SEISMIC grant program at BSU, funded by the National Science Foundation’s S-STEM program. With Dr. Randy Hohle, he is working on revisions for the next edition of The New Urban Sociology, and his current research includes an examination of the geography and demographics of the working class and shifts in occupational structures in post-industrial metropolitan regions.
Todd Schoeplflin
Writer
Todd Schoepflin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Niagara University. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Stony Brook University in 2004. His research and teaching interests include qualitative methods, race and ethnicity, social psychology, media, and the scholarship of teaching sociology. His main loves in life are family, baseball, and sociology. His favorite albums are Revolver (The Beatles) and Kind of Blue (Miles Davis).
Jonathan Wynn
Writer
Jonathan Wynn works at the intersection of urban and cultural sociology, and is an Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He wrote The Tour Guide: Walking and Talking New York,(2011, University of Chicago Press) and his second book is called Music/City: American Festivals and Placemaking in Austin, Nashville, and Newport (2015, University of Chicago Press). His work has been published in City & Community, Qualitative Sociology, Sociological Forum, Contexts Magazine, and Ethnography. Jonathan Wynn is also the co-editor of the ASA Culture Section Newsletter.
Myron Strong
Writer
Myron T. Strong graduated with his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of North Texas in 2014. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Community College of Baltimore County in Baltimore, Maryland. His current research focuses on Afrofuturism and explores race, gender, and other social factors in modern comics. Life-long learner and traveler, lots of his stories come from experiences in other countries. He fully embraces the quote by Ibn Buttuta, “Traveling—it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.”
Past Contributors
Peter Kaufman
Writer
Peter Kaufman taught sociology at the State University of New York (SUNY) New Paltz from 1999 until 2018. He received his Ph.D. from Stony Brook University and his B.A. from Earlham College. He taught courses in introduction to sociology, sociological theory, education and society, social interaction, social change, and sociology of sport. He was an avid cyclist and swimmer, and was also the drummer in an all-faculty punk-rock cover band named Questionable Authorities. His motto for teaching and learning (and life) came from Shunryu Suzuki’s classic book on Zen Buddhism, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” Sadly, Peter passed away on November 18, 2018.
Janis A. Prince Inniss
Writer
Janis Prince Inniss, Ph.D., M.M.F.T, is on the faculty of the University of South Florida (USF) online in-service training program for children’s mental health and that of Saint Leo University. Her work appears in The Politics of Black Women’s Hair and the Everyday Sociology Reader. She is lead author of Serving Everyone at the Table: Strategies for Enhancing the Availability of Culturally Competent Mental Health Services, which examines the accessibility of mental health services for racially/ethnically diverse children and their families. Dr. Prince Inniss is tickled that she found a way to turn her childhood penchant for asking “why” into a legitimate means of employment. She is interested in the ways that people communicate, love in families, global ideas about race and ethnicity, and in seeing the underdog thrive.
Teresa Irene Gonzales
Writer
A native of Mexican-Chicago, Teresa Irene Gonzales is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Knox College. She received her Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley and her B.A. from Smith College. Her research centers on the intersection of organizational ecology, urban studies, and community development within the United States. In other words, she studies why things are built where and who gets to decide on it. She believes in community-engaged pedagogy and scholarship, and strives towards a practice of reciprocity in research. She is still surprised that people pay her to read and write.
Sally Raskoff
Writer
Sally Raskoff has been employed as a sociologist since the mid 1980s and is currently the Chair of Sociology and Ethnic Studies at Los Angeles Valley College. She has always been a technology nerd, but she has taken up weaving to balance her experiences and truly understand what the Luddites were talking about. Her broad interests in sociology and in life include sex/gender, race/ethnicity, social class, statistics, theory, methods, consumerism, and civic engagement.
C.N. Le
Writer
C.N. Le is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department and Director of the Asian & Asian American Studies Certificate Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He received his B.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Irvine and his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University at Albany, SUNY. His research focuses generally on race/ethnicity and immigration and specifically on analyzing socioeconomic measures of assimilation among Asian Americans. Most of the time, he strives to find a sense of balance between competing forces —liberal vs. conservative, objective vs. subjective, etc. He also lives by the credo: “I don’t know what the key to success is, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”
Bradley R.E. Wright
Writer
Bradley Wright is an associate professor at the University of Connecticut, where he teaches social psychology and religion. He is a Christian, a husband, and a father, and he adores goofing around. His hobbies include photography, hang gliding, landscaping, and eating ice cream (listed in roughly ascending order of competence).
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Kevin Dunlap
Digital Media Editor
Eileen Connell
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Sleeping Through College
By There is little that is more humbling to a college professor than seeing someone yawn or even doze off during class. I’ve seen this happen during lively class discussions, videos, games and while using other classroom technology to try and keep things interesting.
Sometimes I’ve asked the student individually what was going on, and sometimes I have gotten reasonable answers. One student told me he worked as a paramedic during the night shift to pay for school. Another said she was adjusting to a new medication that made her drowsy.
A few times, repeat dozers who were failing the class came to see me to ask what they could do to improve their grade (I kid you not). With a straight face, I tell them that consciousness may help them grasp the material better.
Most students don’t literally sleep in class, but I suspect many people figuratively sleep through college.
It’s easy to do, actually. Students become experts at how to get the best grades possible, and the most painless way to meet the requirements for a degree. Many people find themselves going through the motions without ever thinking, “Why am I really here?”
This is not entirely students’ fault; those who excel in high school are often people who learn to “do school” and navigate a bureaucracy. This is a skill in itself, but one we are seldom conscious of developing.
Here are some clues that you may be sleeping though college:
- You sign up for most of your classes because you have heard they are easy
- You choose classes because your friends are taking them
- You selected your major because it sounds easy or because it is what someone else wants you to major in
- You haven’t really enjoyed any of your classes
- You’d like to change your major, but think it would be too hard at this point or you don’t know if your parents would approve
- You have no idea what you would like to do after college and you have never given it much thought
- The effort you put into your social life far outweighs the effort you put into your coursework
If any of these experiences sound familiar, you are probably not alone. In fact, I suspect most student can relate to at least one or two of these if they really thought about it.
The good news is it’s never too late to wake up and begin to think critically about your intentions and actions. If you are still a student (or better yet if you are just about to start college), it’s a good idea to ask yourself what you want to get out of the experience.
If it’s a good paying job in a satisfying field, that means figuring out what skills you need to get there, and what you personally will find satisfying. (You might even want to find out what the average starting salary might be to make sure you can afford to pay back any loans you might need.) Here are some of the tools you can develop in college along the way:
- Planning for and meeting multiple deadlines and other time management challenges
- Working in teams with people with diverse backgrounds, abilities, and levels of commitment
- Taking responsibility for your actions and outcomes
- Taking courses in a variety of disciplines to assess your personal interests
- Doing internships (whether paid or for credit) to learn about what it’s really like to work in a field
Recently, 60 Minutes aired a story that questioned whether college is worth the cost. Featuring a billionaire who paid bright, promising students $100,000 to drop out and develop their ideas for new businesses, the piece examined whether tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates—both Harvard dropouts—needed anything a college education had to offer.
Of course most of us are not the next founders of Facebook or Microsoft, as the story pointed out. Is college important for the average person?
The answer is maybe.
On the one hand, the unemployment rate is lower than the national average for those who have completed at least an associate’s degree. Completing a bachelor’s degree means higher weekly earnings on average too. Based on the data, finishing college provides more economic stability than not.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2012
So why did I say maybe? For those who attended college but did not finish their degree, their unemployment rate is higher than the national average and their earnings are lower. While these numbers are slightly better than those with only a high school diploma, it is possible that they accumulated student loan debt in the process.
According to the College Board, the median debt load for all graduates was $11,000 (this number includes those who did not take out loans; the median debt for those that borrowed was $20,000); for those that attended for-profit schools, the median debt was $31,190.
If someone ends up with a significant amount of debt and a degree that won’t help them find a job—or a degree in a field they really never had any interest in to begin with—that creates not just a problem for them but has a ripple effect throughout the economy. The nation’s total student loan debt now exceeds auto loan and credit card debt.
As a USA Today story details, the high levels of debt that many people carry mean that they can’t afford to buy other goods and services, which some analysts think is contributing to the slow recovery of the economy. Business Week explored the challenge of students who had not finished their degrees but had massive student loan debt—sometimes so much that ironically they couldn’t afford to finish their degree.
During commencement season, we hear a lot of inspiring speeches: go for your dreams, the sky’s the limit, you are your own destiny. All of these ideas sound great, but often ring hollow for many people confused about what to do next or why they were there in the first place.
College can be a great experience, providing not just career credentials but a chance to explore your interests and mature i
ndividually and intellectually. That is, if you are awake.
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