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Humans, Dogs, and Social Interaction

By Lisa Smith

When I hear someone refer to their dog as a “fur baby” I cringe. Apparently, I’m not alone. I recently came across a reddit thread titled r/Dog-free, where someone posted, “There is no such thing as a dog ‘parent.’” Another user said, “Anyone who thinks owning a chihuahua is the equivalent of being a father or mother is mentally ill and should be shunned by polite society.”

As a parent of two human children and an owner of one dog, I can attest that parenting and dog owning are not the same thing. I don’t know if the extreme social sanctions proposed by this disgruntled poster are quite in line with the offense. That said, it got me thinking about the ways we work out what human and dog relations mean through social interaction—online and off.

High School and the Sports Spirit Complex

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?

Love Letter to the Indie Bookstore: Radical Third Spaces

By Alyssa Lyons

I’ve always loved books. And I mean loved books. As a child, I’d often comb through the trash to recover discarded tomes. Where my neighbors saw old and water-stained trash, I saw glorious treasure. I'd sniff dog-eared yellowed pages as I skipped home with my latest additions. So it’s not surprising that as an adult, I would come to love bookstores.

Bookstores, especially independent ones, are what sociologist Ray Oldenburg  referred to as “third places.” Third places are virtual or physical spaces outside of home and work/school where people gather, organize, and find and build community. In independent bookstores, it’s not uncommon to find people sipping coffee, working, or quietly sharing space with others who have bookish affinities. Madeleine Roberts-Ganim identified third spaces as places that can “affirm our identities and build empathy for identities different from our own.”

The High School: An Analysis of Yearbooks

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.

Man vs. Bear: A Sociological Hike Through Fear, Gender, and Stereotypes

By Monica Radu

I hadn’t thought about the "Man vs. Bear" debate in quite a while—not since TikTok first erupted with heated takes on whether a man or a grizzly bear would be more dangerous to women. But then today, I took my three youngest kids on a hike in the woods (something I’ve never actually done before), and the question took on a whole new meaning.

We were about 30 minutes into our hike. It was mid-morning, a little cool and rainy, and we hadn’t seen another person on the trail. My kids and I joked about what we'd do if we saw a bear: run away, play dead, or (in my 4-year-old’s plan) fight it off with a stick. It was lighthearted fun. We were thinking about wildlife, not people.

On the Disappearance of Community, Part 2

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.

How Adolescence Misses the Mark on Incel Culture

By Alyssa Lyons

The praise for the recent U.K. show Adolescence is effusive. Popular publications like Slate called Adolescence the best show of the year while the Guardian said it was “such powerful TV that it could save lives.” In just three weeks, Adolescence became the 9th most watched Netflix series of all time. With all the hype, I was curious. So, I settled down to watch the show that captured the “miserable realism” of modern incel culture.

The term "incel" emerged during 1990s internet discourse. Initially, it was used as a self-identifier among men who were involuntarily celibate. As time went on, the term took on a newer meaning: it described men who felt entitled to have sex with women but weren’t able to.