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
