Suchergebnisse

Climate change will affect all life. Sociologists contribute to major climate change reports and are interested in how people are engaging these documents. Major climate change reports coming from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Climate Assessment are used by scientists, policy makers, and localities to assess climate vulnerability and create climate action plans. Although sociologists have been at the forefront of understanding climate change perception, there is limited understanding about how the public interacts with these reports or whether they are even aware of them. The author uses survey data ( n = 1,013) to assess public awareness of these reports. The results suggest that conservative think tanks may be doing a better job at marketing reports to advance their agendas. This is important information as scientists continue to think about how to reach the public to advance mitigation and adaptation efforts and counter climate denialism.

The focus on trans*1 individuals as researcher subjects often problematizes trans* identity, limiting the possibility for trans* individuals to create and co-create bodies of knowledge. Drawing on three years of participatory research in the animal production industry, I discuss the implications of my subjectivity as a trans* man in this particular setting and in my research more broadly. Beyond being a self-reflexive exercise, this study seeks to make a number of theoretical and empirical contributions. First, feminist literature discussing one's subjectivity has largely focused on the dialectical existence between men and women, with little room for trans* or gender diverse perspectives. Further, studies that have acknowledged trans* identity have done so in relation to trans* persons as research subjects, with no recognition of their positionality or the possibility of the trans* researcher. This study seeks to change these paradigms by extending current feminist research frameworks on subjectivity to include greater gender diversity.

Although images are often used in the classroom to communicate difficult concepts, students have little input into their selection and application. This approach can create a passive experience for students and represents a missed opportunity for instructors to engage participation. By applying concepts found in visual sociology to techniques identified in the scholarship of teaching and learning, I created an image-based learning model to address this disconnect. I used discussion board image selection, posting and critique exercises (image-posts), and personal meaning maps (PMMs) as core assignments. This combination increased student comprehension, challenged and altered perceptions of key topics, and gave them a greater sense of agency through reflexive learning. Additionally, students' reception of this model was favorable, with 97 percent reporting that the course met or exceeded their expectations and 95 percent reporting that they learned more in this class than in any previously taken college-level course.

We argue that sociological analyses of inequality could benefit from engaging the literatures on decision-making. In turn, a sociological focus on how contexts and structural constraints influence the outcomes of decisions and the strategies social groups can use in pursuit of their goals could inform our understanding of decision-making. We consider a simple two-class model of income and the need of capitalists and workers to mobilize resources to influence the adaptive landscape that shapes responses to decisions. We then examine the implications of the rational actor model and the heuristics and biases literature for class-based decision-making. We consider the importance of altruism in mobilizing collective action, and we offer some evidence that altruism is most common in the middle ranges of income and that altruism is a major influence on support for redistributive policies. These results, while tentative, suggest the value of having scholars of development and inequality engage with the literatures on decision-making.

Thirty years ago, Hubert M. Blalock Jr. published an article in Teaching Sociology about the importance of teaching statistics. We honor Blalock's legacy by assessing how using Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) in statistics classes can enhance student learning and increase statistical literacy among social science gradaute students. In addition, we assess whether using MTurk has an impact on student ability to make professional progress. We find that, compared to traditional teaching methods, using MTurk increased student performance, perceptions, and outcomes. In addition, using MTurk resulted in a measurable increase in statistical literacy. We recommend that instructors teaching statistics consider how MTurk or similar technologies can be used in their classrooms.

Although researchers have broadly addressed how race, party identification, political ideology, and binary gender categories influence climate change opinions, little attention has been paid to the relationship between sexuality and gender variance (LGBTQ+ identity broadly) and climate change perceptions. Using a quota‐based survey from 2022 that approximates the US population on key demographic characteristics and oversamples LGBTQ+ individuals, we assess the degree to which LGBTQ+ individuals' climate change beliefs and risk perceptions are comparable to cisgender, heterosexual (cishet) individuals, specifically examining climate change beliefs, the perceived threat climate change poses, and worry about climate change. We argue that LGBTQ+ individuals' views are likely to be distinct from their cisgender heterosexual (cishet) counterparts for three reasons: climate change is likely to exacerbate existing structural inequalities, create disaster responses that reinforce heteronormative and discriminatory patterns, and activate LGBTQ+ political culture. We find evidence that LGBTQ+ individuals express higher agreement with climate change beliefs, identify climate change as a greater threat, and worry more about climate change when compared to their cishet counterparts.

Climate change is one of the greatest ecological and social challenges of the twenty-first century. Sociologists have made important contributions to our knowledge of the human drivers of contemporary climate change, including better understanding of the effects of social structure and political economy on national greenhouse gas emissions, the interplay of power and politics in the corporate sector and in policy systems, and the factors that influence individual actions by citizens and consumers. Sociology is also poised to make important contributions to the study of climate justice across multiple lines of stratification, including race, class, gender, indigenous identity, sexuality and queerness, and disability, and to articulate the effects of climate change on our relationship to nonhuman species. To realize its potential to contribute to the societal discourse on climate change, sociology must become theoretically integrated, engage with other disciplines, and remain concerned with issues related to environmental and climate inequalities.

Chronic misgendering is the process of being repeatedly misgendered (referred to as another gender) after informing an individual of gender pronouns (e.g., "she," "he," "they"). Chronic misgendering is symbolic of larger institutional and disciplinary adherence to a paradigm that privileges cisgender people, referred to as a gender essentialist paradigm. In order to understand which disciplines in higher education have more pervasive chronic misgendering, we analyze results from the National Survey of Transgender Graduate Students (n = 245). Graduate students in the natural sciences experience more chronic misgendering compared to graduate students in the social sciences. Those in health and biological science fields (in and closely related to medicine) reported the highest level of chronic misgendering, accounting for the majority of all chronic misgendering in the natural sciences. We argue that not only do these incidents negatively impact transgender graduate students, but they also reflect and reproduce field‐specific expectations for what is considered acceptable misgendering practice in post‐graduate professional environments, such as community health and medicine. As such, chronic misgendering in graduate school functions as unofficial curricula and thus, training for workplace cultures that, to different degrees, devalue transgender people and contribute to structural inequalities.

Sociology plays a key role in empathy development, which is central to addressing complex social problems. However, little is known about what types of courses work best to enhance empathy. In parallel, sociological animal studies (SAS) has evolved as a relatively new subfield focused on assessing human and animal relationships. SAS research suggests that our interactions with animals enhance empathy development. Combining these literatures, we assess if SAS compared to non-SAS courses impact affective and cognitive empathy for humans and animals differently. Findings reveal that students who take SAS courses demonstrate greater postcourse human and animal empathy even when controlling for precourse levels of empathy and other factors that drive empathy development. Although SAS remains on the periphery of the discipline, this study suggests that it should be a central component of the sociological curriculum.