Everyday Sociology Blog

Honoring Parents

By Sally Raskoff

How do you spend the two days of the year that we honor the challenging and important job that parents do? Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are celebrated in the U.S. in May and June, respectively. Both days generate many family interactions, restaurant orders, greeting card sales, and phone calls.

On the surface, these days appear to be equivalent and equally valued holidays that are meant to honor those who generate and raise children. However, the history and current practices highlight some differences in what mothers and fathers mean to our society.

Social Interactions

By Todd Schoepflin

There I was, sitting on a bar stool, having a beer and shooting the breeze with my brother-in-law Jim, and watching people bowl together. I don’t get out much, so it was eventful just to hang out at a bowling alley for a few hours. But a surprising interaction occurred that night. A woman, who appeared to be drunk, touched my face as she walked by me and said something about my eyes that I think was intended as a compliment.

Who Makes America?

By Sally Raskoff

Have you watched the recent television shows on the “making” of America?

The first, The Men Who Built America, has been followed by a second, Makers: Women Who Make America.

Sociologically, these shows are fascinating and highlight many societal issues that we analyze in sociology classes. The content of each provides a window into part of the country’s history; yet the naming of these shows and their specific content highlight how we think about gender.

Asking Sociological Questions

By Peter Kaufman

I often tell students that I hope they leave my classes with more questions than answers. This statement may seem counterintuitive. Our typical model of education is based on the idea that students’ heads should be filled with knowledge such as definitions, dates, and all sorts of data. The idea that students would finish their coursework with more question marks than periods goes against the conventional wisdom of schooling.

By making this statement I am suggesting that if students want to take what they’ve learned in class and extend it into their social worlds then they will need to know how to ask questions. If they are merely satisfied with the knowledge that has been instilled in them then they have probably not been challenged intellectually. More important, or more troubling, leaving a class without any lingering questions is likely to inhibit their ability to be life-long learners.

Revisiting Research

By Sally Raskoff

The journal Social Forces has published many classic studies in sociology in its ninety year history. To celebrate,the publisher has offered free public access. Even better, each of these articles has updates or reflection articles from the original authors.

While new research is always being pursued, it is important to realize that classic work still has an important contribution to make – that’s why you end up reading so much of it in sociology classes. On the other hand, it is important not to just accept the older work as consistently applicable but to reflect, reassess, reapply the findings to see if they retain their power of explanation. If the findings are no longer as relevant, we can  learn about how life has changed or what the research might have missed, created as it is rooted in a particular time and place.

Everyday Sociology Talk: Sex and Gender and the Transgender Process

Kristen Schilt, author of Just One of the Guys? discusses how the transgender process challenges traditional sociological approaches to understanding gender.

For more video, see www.youtube.com/nortonsoc

Everyday Sociology Talk: Migration and Masculinity

 

Sociologist Josh LePree discuss how men who migrate negotiate and reconstruct their masculinity.

For more video, see www.youtube.com/nortonsoc

Ecological Fallacies

By Sally Raskoff

 I’m one of those people who still reads the print newspaper. Actually, I read three of them, and am periodically aware of how they present the same news story in such different ways.  Sometimes it takes looking at a variety of different sources to see how the presentation of a new research study can be misleading thanks to word choice or conclusions that the reporter draws that the study itself actually does not make.

For instance, when the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released their Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) they had some fascinating findings on abortion rate trends.

The CDC noted that “Compared with 2008, the total number and rate of reported abortions for 2009 decreased 5 percent, representing the largest single year decrease for the entire period of analysis,” and … “From 2000 to 2009, the total number, rate, and ratio of reported abortions decreased 6 percent, 7 percent, and 8 percent, respectively, to the lowest levels for 2000–2009.”

Thinking Sociologically about Twilight

By Tanya Erzen

Tanya Erzen is an associate professor of comparative religious studies at Ohio State University and visiting scholar at University of Washington.

A teenage fan of the Twilight series explains that she thinks Edward Cullen, the brooding and gorgeous vampire hero, is controlling, creepy and even violent in his relationship with Bella, an ordinary human high school girl with whom he is passionately in love.  While the fan criticizes Bella and Edward’s tumultuous relationship, she is simultaneously wearing a button on her jacket with the text, “Edward can bust my headboard, bite my pillow and bruise my body any day.”   This refers to the part of the story when Bella awakes with her entire body black and blue after losing her virginity on her honeymoon.   In the aftermath, there are feathers from the pillow Edward has bitten drifting around the room, and the bed is shattered into pieces. 

Women, Gaming, & Violence

By Jonathan Wynn

What happens when a woman wants to study images of women in the gaming world?

Anita Sarkeesian’s blog, Feminist Frequency, is a great resource for anyone thinking about gender in media and technology. Her YouTube clips on female types in movies are short, pithy, and smart. Sociology has a long history of analyzing different constructed typologies, something I wrote about here, and Sarkeesian’s video about the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” trope (think Natalie Portman in the film Garden State) is as good an example as any of how characters are crafted and reproduced in the digital age.