Contexts

sociology for the public

Guest posts

Empathy is Hard. What We Need is (Sociological) Imagination

by Clare L. Stacey
Photo by David Drexler (Source: Flickr) I live in the liberal bubble of Kent, Ohio, home to … Read More

Arranged Marriage in the Spotlight of “Indian Matchmaking”

by Keera Allendorf
Image by rajeshkoiri007 (Source: Pixabay) In Netflix’s docuseries, “Indian Matchmaking,” singles search … Read More

Are google searches different in states with more Trump supporters? A look at searches about gender, race, and sexuality

by Elizabeth Balzac, Paula England, and and Andrew Levine
Image by chayka1270 (Source: Pixabay) You can tell something about a person—or a state—by their Google searches. This is … Read More

Vaccines, Masks, and Routine Disruptions during COVID-19

by Rashawn Ray and Fabio Rojas
COVID-19 has forever changed the world and our lives. As of the beginning of July, the total COVID-19 cases around the world is approaching … Read More

Who gets to define what’s ‘racist?’

by Musa al-Gharbi
One key insight of the “discursive turn” in social research is how concepts are defined, and by whom, reveals a lot about power relations within … Read More

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

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

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

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.