While in Las Vegas this month for the annual ASA and SSSP conferences, I had many conversations with other sociologists about their opinion of Las Vegas.  Two themes emerged: 1) sociologically, it is a fascinating study of virtual reality, gambling, gender stratification/sexual objectification, etc.; 2) personally, no one likes it.  This was such an important dimension of this year’s major conference location that Inside Higher Ed published a well-written piece on it.  Check it out here:

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/08/26/sociology_conference_in_vegas

One challenge sociologists face is getting their work out to the general public through mainstream news outlets.  I often come across stories by journalists about a variety of topics that sociologists have been discussing in our scholarly literature for years (sometimes decades).  Here’s an exception about self-injury from Drs. Peter and Patricia Adler, well-known sociologists of deviance:

http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2011/08/23/self-injury-a-silent-epidemic/?hpt=hp_bn6

This year’s Society for the Study of Social Problems annual meeting was very productive and full of interesting sessions and presentations.  My work with Dr. Joel Best focused on the sociological dimensions of cancer clusters.  We examined the role of statistics, rhetoric, and uncertainty in how cancer clusters are presented and understood in the news media.

Try looking up environmental burdens in your area with these sites:

http://toxtown.nlm.nih.gov/

http://scorecard.goodguide.com/

http://www.ejnet.org/toxics/

http://www.good.is/post/look-up-pollution-levels-in-your-area

I once overheard that “there are no radical students anymore, not even in sociology.”  Do you agree?  What does it mean for a student to be “radical” in our current social, cultural, political, and economic climate?  Often we associated being radical with a sweeping critique of current structures of power, standing defiant and instilling rebelliousness with a purpose.  As Newman (2006) noted:

“Defiance is more than rebelliousness. We normally defy somebody identifiable—our parents, our teachers, our bosses or our government—and the actions we take to express that defiance are commonly calculated ones. If we are to turn rebelliousness into defiance, we need to instill purpose into it. We may be rebellious by nature, culture or inclination, but we have to choose to be defiant.” (p.61)

How are students of sociology radicalized, defiant, and rebellious today?

[Newman, Michael. 2006. Teaching Defiance: Stories and Strategies for Activist Educators. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.]

One commonly heard idiom in a university is that students are taught how to think critically.  What does this mean?  Newman (2006) noted:

“It is common enough these days to hear people say that we should teach critical thinking, but this injunction has become platitude.  There was a time when critical thinking derived from critical theory. This kind of critical thinking involved separating out “truth” from “ideology.” It meant analyzing human activity in terms of power and refusing to take the words, ideas, injunctions and orders of others at face value. It meant not letting others make up our minds for us. It meant abandoning the search for some fixed set of principles and adopting a stance of informed and continual critique. Critical thinking was not a neutral activity. Like the critical theory from which it sprang, critical thinking was associated with the pursuit of social justice.” (p.9)

As students of sociology, do you agree that “this injunction has become platitude?”  How does sociology provide students with the tools to think critically?  Has the term been “domesticated?”

[Newman, Michael. 2006. Teaching Defiance: Stories and Strategies for Activist Educators. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.]

A key issue in the sociological study of health and illness is UNCERTAINTY.  From fears of vaccines, trying to understand cancer clusters, or any other number of protest health social movements, they all hinge on the fundamental dimension of uncertainty and how lay people understand and act on it.  This is especially the case for social movements countering accumulated scientific evidence.  Ranging from calculated risks and probabilities to personal experience, or from the scientific method and its evidence to experiential knowledge, uncertainty allows the individual cause for trust or cause for alarm.