We thank prominent gender and family scholar, Dr. Barbara Risman, for participating in SJMR’s AMA series. Dr. Risman will begin her appointment as Vice-President of the American Sociological Association in August 2015. Below are Barbara’s responses. You can learn more about her research by visiting her website.
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Questions
1. You have been (understandably) critical of biosociology in the past. With that in mind, what are the best ways that biosociologists and sociologists of gender can work together? More generally, what are potential research directions to integrate social constructionist, feminist, and biosocial perspectives?
For this question, I have an easy response. Check out a new publication, Shannon Davis and Barbara Risman, “Feminists Wrestle with Testosterone: Hormones, Socialization and Cultural Interactionism as Predictors of Women’s Gendered Selves.” Social Science Research, Volume 49, January 2015. In short, feminist sociologists should address the issue as scientists do, with research. We should make hypotheses and test them. We started this research as a replication of Udry’s ASR article titled the “The Biological Constraints on Gender.” We thought his analysis inaccurate and we were right. In our analysis, we found that parental socialization has far more explanatory power than hormones. Yet hormones still play a statistically significant, albeit small, role. Read the article for more details on how I think we should deal with bodies in sociology. There is no reason to pretend our social context doesn’t involve the size, shape, color or sex of our bodies. Our bodies are used in the production of systems of inequality by race and gender.
2. There's been some discussion on various blogs and petitions that the ASA is not particularly responsive to some issues. The latest one is the timing/location
...See full postof the annual meeting. There's been some concern that the annual meeting is often located in (1) the most expensive cities and (2) at times that overlap with the beginning of teaching responsibilities. This was the subject of a recent petition. How does the ASA plan to address this issue?
The current President of ASA, Paula England, has appointed a task force including some of those who signed the petition to do some research and propose alternatives. This has been a problem for as long as I can remember. My child is now 28, and I remember missing the first day of kindergarten myself. And yet, I was always glad the Association didn’t meet over winter break, and interfere with family vacations over the holidays. Alternatives often have their own unintended consequences. Cities that are major tourist destinations will bring more members to our meetings. As President of SSS, I know that we have bigger meeting in New Orleans than in Raleigh or Nashville, which are cheaper. So I’m looking forward to hearing the alternatives that the task force proposes.
3. What do you make of the fact that increasingly the majority of ASA election candidates tend to be women?
The nominations committee meets and creates a full slate of candidates for each position. The candidates are ranked and invited to run for office. I do not believe the nominations committee only selects women. Therefore, my hypothesis is that women, more than men, agree to run when asked. Why? Hard to know but again, my hypothesis is that service to the Association has come to be defined (at least by men) as the housework of sociology, and they let women do it. Now, the next logical question is if women win more often than men when they run against each other. I don’t know that answer. But if they do, I’d suggest it is because of the (clearly now mistaken) belief that voting for women brings gender diversity to our leadership. At this point, voting for men would do that.
4. Why did the council vote to not continue posting vision statements for editorial journal positions? Shouldn't increased transparency and the directions in which the ASA journals are going be of importance to the general membership?
I wasn’t on Council at that time and so do not know very much about this issue. In general, I’m all for transparency.
5. Do you think ASA should be strongly involved in taking political stances?
I think every professional association has a responsibility to bring its professional expertise to the public, for the common good. For example, I am thrilled that ASA sponsored an amicus brief in the SCOTUS case on gay marriage now being heard by the Supreme Court. I believe that much of our research is useful for public debate, and policy, and should be brought to bear on social issues. I also think the Association should have strong policies about not supporting states or businesses that discriminate on the basis of sex, race, gender or sexual minority status.
6. What would it take for ASA journals to shift to an online-only, open-source model? Is this an outcome you favor in the long term? Why or why not?
Once again, I’m Vice-President Elect and so have not yet been privy to conversations about this as a Council member. In the long run, I do believe that journals are likely to be published primarily online. I also think that an open-source model is likely to become the norm sometime in the near or distant future. I think the transition to that future world needs to be carefully planned to insure the financial viability of our Association. I do believe that library subscriptions have been an important source of revenue for professional associations in the past.
7. Why are ASA journals such as ASR still limited by page numbers when, first, many of us opt out of receiving paper copies, and second, most of us read the journals online. Using page numbers to restrict the number of excellent articles ASA journals can publish is such an archaic limitation.
At this point all but one ASA journal is also printed and mailed to libraries who want hard copy and to members who do. So for now, that restriction on pages still as it always has been. This is an important issue to think about in the future.
8. What can ASA do to help attenuate, or do I say dare, stop, the adjunctification of faculty positions in Sociology?
I don’t think ASA can do very much about this deplorable situation. We don’t have much influence over state budgets or decreasing financial stability and enrollment at many private schools. But what we might be able to do as a profession is to create some norms about the working conditions are required to provide adjuncts the ability to be good professors. Still, the sad truth is when departments have to teach too many students with too few resources, they are going to hire adjuncts. I think unions are a far more effective organization to fight for faculty rights.
9. Given the changes to academia regarding the rise of adjunct labor and the apparently decline of tenure track sociology professor jobs, do you recommend sociology PhD as a viable career path? Do you think you would be marketable if you were applying for assistant professor jobs in 2016? What alternative career paths do you suggest for sociology PhDs?
I absolutely do continue to recommend sociology PhD as a viable career path! I might not have landed a job the first year I went on the market, as I did, but I certainly believe I would still land an academic tenure track job. Every student of mine who wants to be an academic and is willing to relocate for a position has landed a tenure track job, sometimes after a post-doc. There are baby boomers retiring, and while not all those positions will remain tenure-track, some will. In addition, sociologists are valuable researchers and we have non-academic utility. No sociology PhD should be in one of the Chronicle of Higher Education articles about PhD’s on welfare. Google, Facebook and Twitter hire sociologists. So do county, state and federal agencies. And of course, there are marketing firms as well.
I think we have to stop presuming that every PhD student is destined for an academic job. If you love research and have an intellectual question that you are passionate about research universities are great places to make a career. But there are also research institutes. If you love to teach, there are elite liberal arts colleges, four year intensive teaching focused state institutions, and community colleges with unionized faculties and good wages. And there is the entire private sector. I still think a sociology PhD is a great career choice if you love studying and teaching about society.
10. Dr. Risman, I am one of, I gather, many sociologists who was appalled that you and an ASA Council member, Stephanie Bohon, undercut ASA's (extremely mild) letter in support of academic freedom in the case of Steven Salaita with a competing letter.
In your letter, you endorsed the University of Illinois's position that an academic who has received an offer letter, gave up a tenured position and moved to begin a new tenured appointment, and is within a month of beginning the first term of his teaching has not been hired and has no expectation of due process.
You ignored the evidence suggesting that donor pressure cost Salaita his job, whether because you found this evidence not credible (for reasons that your letter did not engage) or because you consider it irrelevant. You also ignored the arguments from your University of Illinois colleagues in the department that had voted to hire Dr. Salaita that failing to consult them in any respect before the offer was rescinded abrogates their role in shared governance of the university.
Given this context, could you please explain (1) your conception of academic freedom that is consistent with the position you expressed in your capacity as ASA Vice-President; and (2) the circumstances in which you believe it is legitimate for ASA officers and members of council to release individual letters, such as your own, to intervene in support of administrative actions in the face of faculty opposition?
Professor Salaita is not a sociologist, and the hiring practices of University of Illinois are complicated. As an administrator in the same system, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, I know full well that nothing is signed, sealed and delivered until the Board of Trustees signs off. At UIC, we have had the designation of Emeriti to a retired faculty member declined because the Trustees decided against it. I’m not saying this is a good practice, just the one that exists and therefore is legal. The Chancellor was within her right to do as she did. Where she procured the information she used to make her decision is not really relevant.
As to the merits of the case, I am a very firm believer in academic freedom. I think that any tenured professor is free to express themselves on social media or in traditional media. That does not mean that we have to hire faculty who make it clear they are racist or sexist or homophobic or anti-semitic. If a job candidate posted on social media that he believed women aren’t as smart as men and we shouldn’t waste time trying to overcome their barriers in traditionally male-dominated fields, or that homosexuality is an abomination, we are free to decide not to hire them. If someone holds values that hiring officials think would impede their being good professors because they devalue women or LGBT folks, we do not have to hire them. Nor do I think most of the people reading this would expect a sociology department to hire someone who was openly racist, sexist or homophobic. I think we all agree that universities have the right to hire people they believe will be fair and good professors. The question then becomes if Professor Salaita’s public pronouncements were anti-semitic or not. I think that reasonable people can disagree on that point. I clearly believed they crossed a line and were anti-semitic and not simply anti-Israeli policy. By the way, I agreed with the critiques of the military occupation. I find it disheartening that progressive academics are very concerned with every kind of bias except the rising anti-semitism across the world.
I totally agree with the positions Kerry Ann Rockquemore laid forth in her recent column in Inside Higher Ed on the use of social media. It’s one important way of being a public sociologist, but those wishing to be tenured faculty have to know that their public media is PUBLIC and will affect the opinions of colleagues and evaluators. So everyone has to make conscious decisions about what and how to post. Here is the column I think well worth reading on the topic. https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2015/05/20/essay-issues-facing-young-academics-social-media
11. Why are the membership and conference fees so much higher for ASA than for other professional academic organizations (eg, AEA)? What services does ASA provide to its members that those associations do not that would justify the high costs of membership?
I don’t think we are out of line with other associations. We have a sliding scale based on income and not all professional associations do. For those in the $55k-$85k range, we are very much in line with psychology, slightly less than political science, slightly more than anthropology. I don’t why the American Economic Association is less expensive. I have no idea what kinds of services they provide their members.
The real question is what kinds of experiences membership provides. ASA sections work actively to involve students in all aspects of the association, including on Councils. Many sections have mentorship programs. Trails is an amazing resource for new teachers. And of course, we have the employment service as well. We have a wide variety of journals and professional socialization workshops for students and young professionals. In any profession, new members join the guild that exists in order to be integrated into the ranks. I have no idea if other associations provide all these services for members, but given that our student membership is $50, I think it’s a great buy.
12. What do you make of the Goffman kerfuffle?
I honestly don’t have enough information to make an informed statement.
13. What do faculty think of SJMR? Do many even know that it exists?
Junior faculty definitely know SJMR exists and some follow it. Senior faculty sort of vaguely know that something like it exists but not in much detail and presume it to be mostly rumors and gossip. I only know it exists because I have graduate students who let me know whenever my name or my institution, UIC, comes up in it.