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Do Freebies Build Communities?

By Karen Sternheimer

The community where I live now is littered with Little Free Libraries, small boxes containing books for passers-by to take, and presumably also leave used books in as well. While taking walks in my new neighborhood, I started noticing that these little boxes are everywhere. I’ve also spotted a Free Blockbuster box in former newspaper boxes painted with the now defunct Blockbuster Video colors and logo. These boxes apparently contain DVDs and VHS tapes that are free for the taking.

Surreal or Hyperreal? Applying Theory to Disaster

By Karen Sternheimer

How often do you use the word “surreal” to describe an unusual or otherwise mind-boggling experience? That’s the word that kept coming to mind when visiting the remains of my home for the first time two months after it burned down. The AI overview of the word “surreal” describes it as “strange, dreamlike, or unbelievable, often seeming detached from ordinary reality and evoking a sense of the uncanny or fantastic.” Yep, that’s the word.

It got me thinking about the differences—and similarities—between surreal and hyperreal—a concept central to postmodern theory which sociologists have sometimes used to critique traditional theoretical approaches. Can sociological theory help teach us about the meanings we make of disaster?

We Need More Empathy for the Emotions of Animals

By Amanda Gernentz, Sociology Graduate Student, Texas Woman’s University

There is an episode of the kid’s show Rugrats that is burned into my brain. It’s called “A Dog’s Life,” and features scenes from the Pickles family dog’s point of view.

Spike (the dog) continually tries to protect baby Dil from a contraption that his father, Stu, built for him to play in, despite being repeatedly scolded. When the audience hears things from Spike’s point of view, the words the humans speak are gibberish (other than his name), but the tone is clear. You can feel Spike’s emotions, how he hates getting in trouble, but he is so loyal to his small companion that he continually risks the scolding. It really shaped my childhood understanding of the life of a pet and showed me what love and loyalty were from a companion animal.

Teaching and Learning during Catastrophe

By Stacy Torres

The unease that greets me each morning, as I brace myself for the latest chaos erupting in higher education, listening to the radio and eating my oatmeal, feels both new and strangely familiar. I recognize this dread and the chronic fear of further attacks from living through September 11, 2001, in New York City.

But now that terror comes from my own government, with a torrent of executive orders and memos banning DEI, freezing communication, canceling research funding opportunities, terminating active grants, and capping NIH indirect research costs. The recent ICE detentions of Tufts doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk and Palestinian activist and legal permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University, my alma mater, sends another chill through me as I consider the repercussions of such intimidation for dissent and free speech.

Minimalism after Losing “Everything”

By Karen Sternheimer

Over the years, I’ve written about minimalism a lot on this site. After losing my home and most of my possessions in the Los Angeles fire storm in January 2025, I am now officially a minimalist.

Before having this experience, when I’d see emotional reports of people returning to a burnt home, sifting through wreckage of their former stuff, I couldn’t bear to imagine that happening to me. A quick news search of the terms “lost everything in a fire” yields countless hits. What does it mean to lose “everything,” from an insider’s perspective, and why might we define our possessions as “everything” from a sociological perspective?

Privilege in Disaster

By Karen Sternheimer

As I write, it’s been a few months since losing my home in the Los Angeles-area firestorm. In addition to my regular job, I now effectively have a part-time job working to settle insurance claims, get our missing mail, learn about the rebuilding process which means attending Zoom meetings multiple times a week, and also seek disaster relief. I describe this as a major inconvenience, but one that is manageable.

I recognize the role that privilege has played in this process, and how others might have a lot more difficulty navigating losing one’s home in a fire. Setting aside the unique emotional experiences that this might bring—I tend to deal with challenges as problems to be solved intellectually rather than emotionally—there are structural factors that have made this process easier to address for me than for others.

On Being a Temporary Local: Sociological Lessons from Displacement

By Karen Sternheimer

As I recently wrote, I lost my home in the Los Angeles firestorm of January 2025. We are staying in a neighborhood about 25 miles away; while still within the city limits, the neighborhood is far different from our own. This is giving me the chance to learn to become a temporary local, something I regularly do when traveling to another country.

Being a temporary local involves learning new local customs, norms, and practices. While I didn’t need to learn a new language or worry about currency conversion, coming to a new neighborhood has brought some of the same opportunities that traveling abroad does.