Guest posts

Humor, Risk, and Black Twitter: Insights from the 2014 Ebola Outbreak

What types of digital humor emerge during an outbreak? And how does humor help negotiate themes of risk, contagion, and connections with others, particularly within Black Twitter? Read More

How To Fact-Check an Ethnography (or Anything Else)

Recent years have seen increased emphasis on fact-checking in journalism, politics, and academics. Ethnography presents a particular set of challenges that some scholars have … Read More

Book Bans Impact Students’ Worldviews

Do you remember the first book you read that changed your life? I do. It was Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. I was in an … Read More

A Display of White Ignorance in ICE’s COVID-19 Response

As sociologists who study race as it relates to immigrant detention, we see White ignorance as different from ignorance in the more general sense. In … Read More

The Freedom Revolution, Awakened Ancestral Roots of a New Generation, and a Population Moving as One

In many ways, Gen Z Iranians are a combination of the very best and the most important learning experiences of their previous generations. They are marked by their perseverance and their refusal to use old modes of protective denial in order to navigate the impact of the paradoxes of life in, as their parents and grandparents did before them. They will continue to form a collective self through their agentic, adversarial approach to effecting change. For all these reasons, “The Women of Iran” are the right choice for Time Magazine’s 2022 Heroes of The Year. Read More

Facial Difference, Social Disability (Or, Why I Didn’t Mind Masking)

Finalizing my divorce, searching for a new place to live, re-evaluating the possibility of a family—I was stressed out in November of 2009. Then my … Read More

“Woman, Life, Freedom” and the Progressive Academe

On September 13, 2022, a 22-two-year-old Kurdish woman named Jina (Mahsa) Amini was arrested by “Morality Police” in Tehran, Iran, with the charge of defying … Read More

Another mass killing in a gay bar

Journalists don’t contact me when new bars open, when they set new fundraising records, or when their events send queer joy spilling into the streets. Read More

Climate Change, Redlining, and Our Institutions’ Blue Roofs

Dilapidated homes, unoccupied with boarded windows. Overgrown patches of land, acres of empty parking lots with vines slowly reclaiming the space. Big box … Read More

Home-Working’s Covid Comeback

Working from home was on a long, downward slide until the 1980s, when sectoral shifts and information technologies triggered a reversal. For a couple of … Read More