ASA 2021, Newsletter

Podcasting for Sociologists: lessons learned from making an international teaching podcast on culture and inequality in pandemic times

By Luuc Brans and Giselinde Kuipers – Center for Sociological Research, KU Leuven, Belgium  As COVID-19 lockdowns swept across university campuses in early 2020, academics around the world shifted their teaching to virtual platforms. As students and their tutors soon found out, online teaching was challenging. Students found online lectures boring, academics found the lectures exhausting to deliver, class discussions were difficult to stimulate, and … Continue reading Podcasting for Sociologists: lessons learned from making an international teaching podcast on culture and inequality in pandemic times

Culture Section Editors
ASA 2021, Newsletter, Review

Book Review: “Creating the Creation Museum”

Oberlin, Kathleen C. 2020. Creating the Creation Museum: How Fundamentalist Beliefs Come to Life. New York: NYU Press. Reviewed by Gemma Mangione On January 22, 2017, Kellyanne Conway — a senior adviser to then-president Donald J. Trump — defended the White House’s press secretary’s recent assessment that attendance numbers at Trump’s 2016 inauguration exceeded that of Barack Obama’s in 2008. Despite photo evidence to the … Continue reading Book Review: “Creating the Creation Museum”

Culture Section Editors
ASA 2021, Conference Report, Newsletter

Report: “The 2020 Election: A Cultural Post-Mortem”

By Bo Yun Park (Harvard University) The Culture and Contemporary Life Talk Series is a new initiative launched by the Sociology of Culture Section of American Sociological Association. It provides an opportunity to discuss the pressing issues of our time and analyze them through a cultural lens. The members of the Culture and Contemporary Life Series Committee—Hannah Wohl, Lisa McCormick, Meltem Odabas, Matt Rafalow, and Shai … Continue reading Report: “The 2020 Election: A Cultural Post-Mortem”

Culture Section Editors
ASA 2021, Newsletter

Culture Section Mentorship Program: Reflections and Future Prospects

By Amy Zhang (George Mason University) and Dustin Kiskaddon (UC Davis) At its best, the section’s mentorship program invites junior sociologists backstage. They can learn what Howard Becker might call “tricks of the trade” as they develop ideas and gain insight into the institutional reproduction of the sociology of culture and cultural sociology. We–Amy Zhang (ABD George Mason) and Dustin Kiskaddon (ABD UC Davis)–thrived as … Continue reading Culture Section Mentorship Program: Reflections and Future Prospects

Culture Section Editors
ASA 2021, Interview, Newsletter

Four Questions for Lindsay DePalma

AJ Young (The Institute for Study Abroad) interviews Lindsay DePalma (UC San Diego) on“The Passion Paradigm”, 2020 winner of the Culture Section Richard A. Peterson Prize for Best Graduate Student Paper and new article out in Sociological Forum. Tell us a little about yourself, your research, and any info on your future career plans you’d like to share.  In June of 2020 I defended my dissertation … Continue reading Four Questions for Lindsay DePalma

Culture Section Editors
ASA 2021, Newsletter

Race and Sociology of Art

By Fiona Greenland (University of Virginia) and Patricia Banks (Mount Holyoke College) The art world is replete with the same forces of anti-Black racism that permeate society as a whole: pay inequality in the arts sector, lack of representation in U.S. art galleries, and few Black people or people of color appointed to positions of power in museums. To give adequate scholarly attention to these … Continue reading Race and Sociology of Art

Culture Section Editors