Everyday Sociology Blog

Children and Global Gentrification

By Teresa Irene Gonzales

I recently gave a talk to the newly formed chapter of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Campus Initiative at Knox College. Founded by the United Nations in 1946 to provide aid to Children affected by World War II, UNICEF works in countries across the globe to improve the lives of children through research, health care, access to clean water and sanitation, and emergency relief, to name a few.

Their campus initiatives encourage college students to promote the mission of UNICEF, engage in fundraising, and organize educational panels. Like many clubs and organizations on college campuses, and especially at Knox, there is a component of philanthropy, volunteerism, and community engagement that underlines the work students do with UNICEF. At the same time there is a training component, where students learn how to become civically engaged in projects that they are passionate about.

How Sociology Majors Prepare for the Labor Force

By Karen Sternheimer

Every year, students ask me what kinds of jobs they might get with a degree in sociology. In today’s job market, a major is not typically direct vocational training, preparing you for a specific field, but instead a major allows students to develop skill sets that translate into the work force. Sociology provides students with the chance to develop many of these important skills.

In 2015, the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AACU) published the results of a survey on how well prepared college graduates are for the labor market. The survey asked recent graduates how they rated themselves on a variety of skills, and also asked employers how they recent graduates on these same skills. Students consistently rated themselves higher than employers on each skill.

This is Your Brain on Sociology

By Peter Kaufman

“My head hurts!”

I’m sure many students have uttered these words after sitting through a particularly dense or complex sociological lesson. I know I’ve felt this way during my own education and I have certainly heard students say it at the end of class. But do our heads literally hurt when we are studying difficult material? Or is this phrase just a figure of speech to convey how confusing the topic is we are trying to learn?

The Brumble

By Jonathan Wynn

As a professor at a large northeastern university, I spend a fair amount of time listening to students talk. Particularly before class, as I do some last minute shuffling of my notes or plugging in my PowerPoint, I’ll overhear conversations. There’s a common—but assuredly not universal—male speech pattern I’ve noticed. It’s a kind of low, back-of-the-throat mumble I started to call a brumble (i.e., bro + mumble).

Two years ago, there was quite the uptick in interest on how some women speak with a kind of rasp or “creaky voice”—an example is Zooey Deschanel’s character on New Girl--and the term “vocal fry” became quite popular. This corresponded with other supposed concerns over how women speak, like using “uptalk” or, more technically, “high rising terminal” (i.e., ending every sentence with a high note, implying a question) and, like, dropping “like” in a sentence. The idea of vocal fry becoming problematized as a characteristic of young women’s speech was seen as pervasive enough that even feminists like Naomi Wolf spoke out to say that women should drop vocal fry and “reclaim their strong female voices.”

The Social Geography of Health

By Karen Sternheimer

Where we live matters, but not just for the reasons we might think. While we might associate the weather or terrain with a particular region or location, it's also important to consider the social forces that help explain how where we live shapes our health and even our life expectancy.

A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association details how life expectancies vary dramatically by county in the United States. For instance, if you are fortunate enough to live in Marin County, California, or Summit County, Colorado, your average life expectancy is about 87. But if you live in Oglala Lakota County, South Dakota, or in some parts of West Virginia and Kentucky, your life expectancy could be a full two decades shorter.