Contexts

sociology for the public

Contexts Blog

Will a NFL Player Take a Knee at the Super Bowl?

by Simón E. Weffer, Rodrigo Dominguez-Martinez, and Raymond Jenkins
Where is the “Take a Knee” movement today as the National Football League’s (NFL) 100th season comes to a close, four seasons after Colin Kaepernick first … Read More

Twenty Years in a Culture of Fear

by Daniel Harrison
    It has been 20 years since Barry Glassner first published The Culture of Fear: Why Americans … Read More

Does Masturbation Teach Women to Orgasm in Partnered Sex? (Maybe, but It’s Not Clear)

by Paula England, Sophie Saydah, and Andrew Levine
In 1994, while attending a United Nations conference on AIDS, U.S. Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders was asked her opinion on promoting masturbation to discourage youth … Read More

Sexual Behavior and Attitudes among White, Black, Latinx, and Asian College Students

by Emma Patton, Paula England, and Andrew Levine
In her 2017 book American Hookup, Lisa Wade says, based on what some students of color told her, that “in some ways, hookup culture is … Read More

CALL FOR PAPERS: Ethnographies of the Global South

by Victoria Reyes and Marco Garrido
Contexts is a quarterly magazine that makes cutting-edge social research accessible to general readers. The magazine is issuing a call for papers for its Winter 2021 … Read More

After Experiences of Unwanted Sex, Queer Women See Men as “Stupid”

by Elena Riecke, Jessie Ford, and Paula England
Queer college women experience some of the highest rates of unwanted sex but remain some of the most overlooked in research. Here, we examine self-identified … Read More

Are Social Scientists Next to be Imprisoned and Tortured? A call to unite and oppose the criminalization of social science

by David Lempert
Over the past several weeks, there have been a number of troubling events striking fear among many of us in the social sciences who study … Read More

There is No Green Book for Walking

by Jennifer D. Roberts
Why do African-Americans still need to cautiously navigate as pedestrians? Late last year, the movie “Green Book,” starring Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen was released. Read More

Varsity Blues and Lawsuits, Too

by W. Carson Byrd
A seemingly continuous stream of news about college admissions has flowed across the airwaves in the past several months. Multiple lawsuits against race-conscious admissions policies … Read More

Rwanda, Genocide, and Gender-based Violence

by Nicole Fox
This month marks 25 years since the 1994 genocide that unfolded before the international community’s watchful eyes in the small East African country of Rwanda. Read More

About Contexts

Contexts is a quarterly magazine that makes cutting-edge social research accessible to general readers. We're the public face of sociology.

It is a publication of the American Sociological Association, edited by Amin Ghaziani and Seth Abrutyn (University of British Columbia), with Letta Page.