Everyday Sociology Blog

Restrooms in Cultural Context

By Karen Sternheimer

Several years ago, I visited the Mauna Kea Observatory on the Big Island of Hawai’i. I was surprised and amused by a sign I saw in the visitor’s bathroom, instructing users how to, um, use the facilities. I had previously taken this action as self-evident once one was old enough to regulate one’s bathroom activities. But this turned into one of many important lessons that travel can offer:  It helps us learn about cultural practices that we might take for granted.

Class and Geographic Mobility in Academia: Global Perspectives on Class Cultural Mismatch and Linguistic Imperialism in Higher Education

By Colby King, Kamil Luczaj, Assistant Professor of Sociology,  University of Information Technology and Management (Rzeszow, Poland), and Calvin Odhiambo, Associate Professor of Sociology, USC Upstate

In January 2022, we held a panel discussion about our research as well as our individual experiences, describing what we know about how social class inequality and geography play a role in social mobility. We discussed how social class mobility intersects with race, language and dialect, geographic background, and gender in career opportunities, particularly how these issues heighten class cultural mismatch, creating challenging circumstances even for successful academics experiencing upward class mobility.  

Dr. Luczaj is a sociologist from Poland. He is interested in international academic careers and working-class cultures. His research addresses the complex relationship between class position and migration experience. For example, he has published a study on foreign-born scholars in Central Europe, and a meta-analysis on foreign-born scholars “on the peripheries.”

Originally from Kenya, Dr. Odhiambo’s experiences as an international academic illustrate many of Dr. Luczaj’s research findings. Dr. King is not an international academic, but has experienced social class mobility through his academic career, and has also written about efforts to support students, faculty, and staff in higher education from first-generation and working-class backgrounds.

Road Trip: Culture Shock and Renting a Car in Italy

By Karen Sternheimer

Culture shock is one of the most basic concepts in sociology, involving a feeling of confusion in a new environment that those accustomed to the location likely take for granted. Taking a road trip in a foreign country is a great way to experience culture shock: something at once familiar becomes strange in a place where the language and customs are different from what we are used to. Culture shock one of the most interesting things about travel.

Renting a car in most other countries often means that the instrument panels will look different, especially if the speedometer is based on kilometers per hour rather than miles per hour. While most rental cars in the U.S. have automatic transmission, nearly all European rentals are manual transmission, commonly known as a stick shift. And the one that we rented on our most recent trip didn’t even take gasoline, but instead ran on metano.

Applying the Sociological Imagination to COVID-19

By Karen Sternheimer

By now you have likely heard of the Novel Coronavirus, or COVID-19. Maybe your school or workplace has shifted online for the time being, or you have noticed a shortage of cold and flu related items at your local store.

While this is a rapidly changing situation, we can use this example to help us understand several sociological concepts:

Language and Culture

By Karen Sternheimer

Have you studied a foreign language? If you have and are in the U.S., you may be in the minority, according to a recent report from the Pew Research Center. According to the report, about 20 percent of K-12 students in the U.S. were enrolled in a foreign language course in 2017. By contrast, 92 percent of European students were learning a foreign language during this time frame.

Wide disparities exist regarding foreign language study within the U.S. according the report, ranging from 51 percent of New Jersey students to just 9 percent in Arizona, Arkansas, and New Mexico. These disparities largely stem from differing state requirements; just ten states and the District of Columbia have a foreign language requirement for high school graduation.

Being a Temporary Foreigner

By Karen Sternheimer

As C. Wright Mills noted in The Sociological Imagination, one of our tasks as sociologists is to “make the familiar strange.” Traveling to a foreign country—especially one where you barely speak the language—is a great way to undertake Mills’s advice.

Travel highlights how many little things we take for granted while interacting with others. The most obvious barrier is speaking the same language. While we English speakers of the world are uniquely privileged because so many people speak our language, or at least some of our language, not everyone does.

Race and Studying Abroad

By Jonathan Wynn

Have you been traveling this summer? If you have, I’m sure that you packed your sociological imagination with you. Last month I participated in a Study Abroad trip with a group of first year students who were all either first-to-college or global majority students. We traveled to the Dominican Republic so the students could do an intensive cultural exchange and service learning course.

These students are part of a program to improve racial and ethnic diversity in our Honors College here at UMass Amherst, and I taught Intro to Sociology with them last fall. Similar to honors programs (as well as high school college prep courses) study abroad programs are, generally, a primarily white experience. Only about 5% of students who study abroad are black. Our International Programs Office recognizes this disparity, and assists and supports the program my students participated in because of this inequity.

Birth Rates: Who Will Replace Us?

By Karen Sternheimer

According to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the birth rate in the United States fell to an all-time low in 2016.

Births to teens also fell to an all-time low, down from 41.5 births per thousand in 2007 to 20.3 in 2016, a 51% decline. Birth rates also fell, albeit more modestly, for women in their 20s. By contrast, births to women in their 30s and 40s grew modestly. However, the birthrate for women 40-44 was 11.3 per thousand, and for women 45-49 it was .9, lower than any age group except 10-14-year-olds. Women 25-34 had the highest birthrates, at about 100 births per thousand.

What does this mean for our population overall?

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.