The Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA) held its 10th annual Social Science Advocacy Day on April 9. Now, COSSA is asking social scientists and others to contact Congress directly.

COSSA writes, "Congressional appropriators are preparing legislation that will determine funding for federal science and statistical agencies for the next year. With strict discretionary budget caps currently in place, it is essential that we fight for the prioritization of social and behavioral science research funding in fiscal year (FY) 2025. Now is the time to write to your Members of Congress to urge their support for research funding in FY 2025!"

Visit the COSSA Action Center page to send a letter to your Senators and Representative and tell them why it is critical that they prioritize funding in FY 2025 for the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Institute of Education Sciences, National Institute of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, International Education and Foreign Language Programs, and the federal statistical system. 

On March 18, President Joe Biden issued an Executive Order, titled “Advancing Women’s Health Research and Innovation.” This order directs specific advancements and improvements for research on women’s health, largely through the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research, established by the Presidential Memorandum of November 13, 2023.

The Consortium of Social Science Associations reports that the Initiative draws on interdisciplinary backgrounds to advance research on the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of conditions that affect women uniquely, disproportionately, or differently. This order now names the following topics of interest: women’s midlife health, addressing current gaps in research, and integrating women’s health research into federal research programs. These directions align with the President’s priorities to reduce health disparities, to translate research into real-life applications, and to ensure access to high-quality, evidence-based health care. The Executive Order coincided with many announcements made by federal agencies to promote women’s health research.

The Consortium of Social Science Associations reported in January that the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) in the National Science Foundation (NSF) had released Knowledge Base, a new user resource on NCSES tools and data. The website provides robust information on how to understand and use NCSES data as well as answers to frequently asked questions and a glossary for commonly used terms. The Knowledge Base is intended to help people navigate NCSES data while simultaneously providing support in an easy and accessible way. This resource comes as NCSES works towards making their data more available for public use.

NCSES is now requesting responses to a survey intended to improve NCSES data tools. This link will take you directly to the survey.

by Michelle Newton-Francis and Gay Young

Nadia’s Initiative is the 2024 recipient of the Anna Julia Cooper Award for Public Sociology by a Community Organization. In the face of socially produced racial/ethnic and gender inequalities, Nadia’s Initiative (NI) is dedicated to promoting sustainable projects for rebuilding communities displaced by war and conflict and advocating globally for survivors of conflict-related sexual violence.

Recently, the founder and president of Nadia’s Initiative, Nadia Murad, was named by Time as one of the Women of the Year 2024. Her profile opens as follows: “Nadia Murad dreamed of running her own beauty salon in Kojo [northern Iraq] … ‘In my imagination, the salon was a safe space where women and girls could share ideas, learn things, and have something for themselves,’ she says.” While Time’s emphasis on “the dream” of running a beauty salon is cringe-worthy, the opening sentence of Nishaun T. Battle’s article on Black girls and beauty salons argues, “The African-American beauty salon has the potential to be a space of refuge for Black women and a place where Black girls can learn from Black women about the challenges they experience in their daily lives.” * Battle maintains that the beauty salon provides a place for social commentary on emotional, mental, and physical health and where wellness and growth can thrive. Thus, Nadia Murad’s early imagination emerges as profoundly sociological.

That sociological imagination fully informs NI’s mission of creating a world where women and girls are able to live in equality and communities that have experienced crisis and displacement are redeveloped. NI advocates—at the local, national, and international levels—for resources and policies needed to rebuild communities sustainably and support survivors of sexual violence. Three Guiding Principles for the organization’s work reflect the sociological thinking that frames the analysis of how to remediate racial/ethnic and gender inequalities: All NI programs are (1) Survivor-Centered; (2) Community-Driven; and (3) intended to foster Sustainable Development and Peace.

We also note a significant accomplishment by the organization in its advocacy for survivors of conflict-related sexual violence across the globe. In May 2022, the Murad Code Project was launched as a collaborative effort among NI, the UK government’s Prevention of Sexual Violence Initiative and the Institute for International Criminal Investigations. The code serves as a guide for both investigators and journalists when interviewing survivors of conflict-related sexual and gender based violence. The intention is to institutionalize survivor-centered documentation practices which avoid re-traumatization of survivors and demonstrate respect for survivors’ needs and wishes and their right to make their own choices.

In our view, Nadia’s Initiative enacts approaches to and advocacy for displaced communities and survivors of sexual and gender-based violence that are sociologically informed and relevant to the DCSS service area—not only to residents who have experienced displacement and/or sexual violence, but also to the many local, state, national and international policymakers in the DMV region.

We hope you will join us in honoring Nadia’s Initiative at the April 18 DCSS awards reception.

* Nishaun T. Battle (2021) “Black Girls and the Beauty Salon: Fostering Safe Space for Collective Self-Care,” Gender & Society 35(4):557-66. See also Adia Harvey Wingfield’s Doing Business with Beauty: Black Women, Hair Salons, and the Racial Enclave Economy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), which examines one of the most popular businesses – hair solans – run by Black women, an often-overlooked group of entrepreneurs, revealing Black women business owners’ struggles for autonomy and their successes.

by Jill Brantley 

The Stuart A. Rice Award for Career Achievement will be presented to Steven A. Tuch, Professor of Sociology, Public Policy and Public Administration at the George Washington University, in recognition of his many contributions to scholarship and teaching. Professor Tuch also served as DCSS President (2000-2001) and maintained the DCSS e-mail news list for many years. His career has been focused on two issues: the place of quantitative methodology in the analysis of social science data and the study of inequality in the US and Europe, with a special emphasis on race relations in the US.

Steve has been an active scholar and collaborator, frequently co-authoring with current and past members of DCSS. In 2022, he published (with Paul M. Kellstedt and Guy D. Whitten) The Fundamentals of Social Research (Cambridge University Press). His 2013 book, Religion, Politics, and Polarization, co-authored with William V. D’Antonio and Josiah R. Baker, won the DCSS Rosenberg award in 2015. Other books include The Other African Americans: Contemporary African and Caribbean Immigrants in the United States (co-edited with Yoku Shaw-Taylor, 2007); Race and Policing in America: Conflict and Reform (co-authored with Ronald Weitzer, 2006); and Racial Attitudes in the 1990s: Continuity and Change (co-edited with Jack K. Martin, 1997). Among many articles, he has recently returned to one of his central concerns in “Racial Attitudes in the Deep South: Persistence and change at the University of Alabama, 1963-2013” (with Michael Hughes et. al.), published in Sociological Inquiry in 2023.

Professor Tuch has also been active in building bridges between Polish and American sociology in works like “Urbanism and Tolerance Revisited: Racial Attitudes in the United States” with Michael Hughes in Marta Smagacz-Poziemska, Krzysztof Frysztacki, and Andrzej Bukowski (eds.), Re-Imagining the City: Municipality and Urbanity Today from a Sociological Perspective, 2017.

Steve has been a supportive and generous advisor to dozens of doctoral and MA students in the graduate program and served as Department Chair from 2007 to 2013.

We hope you will join us in honoring Professor Steven A. Tuch at the April 18 DCSS awards reception.

OMB Publishes Revisions to Statistical Policy Directive No. 15: Standards for Maintaining, Collecting, and Presenting Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity

On March 28, OMB published a set of revisions to Statistical Policy Directive No. 15 (Directive No. 15): Standards for Maintaining, Collecting, and Presenting Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity, the first since 1997. This process started in June 2022, with the first convening of the Interagency Technical Working Group of Federal Government career staff who represent programs that collect or use race and ethnicity data. Since that first convening, OMB has reviewed 20,000 comments and held almost 100 listening sessions to finalize the important standards they have announced.

See the complete announcement online.

OMB has extended the time to submit comments on these regulations to April 27. 

Solving Global Poverty

10th Annual Sociology of Development Conference
Johns Hopkins University, Washington, D.C. October 18-20, 2024

The Section invites abstracts for papers for a conference hosted by the American Sociological Association Sociology of Development Section and Johns Hopkins University.  While the theme is "Solving Global Poverty," they welcome submissions on any topic relevant to the sociology of development.

Deadline for Submissions: April 2, 2024 11:59 PM

See the complete call for papers online.

Across the nation, politicians are interfering in educational decisions that should appropriately be made by subject matter experts. In Florida, for example, sociology was removed from the general education core course options by the Board of Governors, despite the recommendation of an expert panel of faculty. Educational gag order laws have been passed in many states, and similar bills are currently under consideration. Several states have executive orders or other forms of policy restricting what can be taught in classrooms. At the heart of these gag orders is the subject matter sociologists teach, including inequality, race, gender, and sexuality. The current political movement against so-called “divisive concepts” is in fact an existential threat to our discipline. The best way to fight these attacks is to demonstrate to voters and policymakers the value of the work we do. That is the goal of the Value of Sociology Initiative.

Update for Students: The Value of Sociology TikTok/Instagram Contest. The deadline to enter is April 22, 2024.

Several DCSS members and friends attended the March 9 performance of Tempestuous Elements, a world premiere play that brought the life of Anna Julia Cooper to the Arena Stage. Tempestuous Elements deals with a moment in 1905 when Cooper, as Principal of the M Street School in DC, the most advanced secondary school for African Americans in the country, fought for the right of African American students to have the option of following either a vocational curriculum or the classical college-preparatory curriculum. In a scandal orchestrated by the government, her tenure as principal is sabotaged by her colleagues and neighbors leading Cooper's professional and personal relationships to become fodder for innuendo and social ostracization.

Anna Julia Cooper’s contributions to social theory, education, and the long struggle for civil rights in Washington, DC, are described in “A Washington Life: the Sociology of Anna Julia Cooper” by Patricia Lengermann and Gillian Niebrugge-Brantley (The Sociologist, May 2016). DCSS established the Anna Julia Cooper Award for Public Sociology by a Community Organization in 2019.

Tempestuous Elements references topics from the legacy of slavery through the unfinished work of Reconstruction to the troubled history of segregated education. It is no exaggeration to say that the issues confronting the characters on the stage in 1905 are all very much still part of our ongoing quest for democracy and justice. Numerous luminaries from the historical struggle for civil rights, including Mary Church Terrell and W. E. B. DuBois, join Cooper in advocating for educational equity for her students.

Read "Anna Julia Cooper’s Courageous Revolt: The History Behind ‘Tempestuous Elements’ at Arena Stage" by Emma O'Neill-Dietel on the WETA Boundary Stones website and "How the Black female head of a top D.C. school was ‘punished for leading’ " by Shirley Moody-Turner in The Washington Post opinion section.

Tempestuous Elements, written by Kia Corthron and directed by Psalmayene 24, would fit well in the syllabus of courses on the sociology of education or the history of civil rights or Washington, DC. Perhaps this new dramatization will generate interest in organizing an academic conference “in the spirit of Anna Julia Cooper.” If you would like to report on your teaching or scholarship on these topics or have thoughts about how we might present them to the DMV sociological community, please let us know at dcsociologicalsociety@gmail.com.

Image courtesy of Sally Hillsman

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine is the host for the Action Collaborative on Preventing Sexual Harassment in Higher Education. "Making higher education a more safe, inclusive, and respectful place where everyone can work and learn." The Action Collaborative brings together leaders from academic and research institutions and key stakeholders to move beyond basic legal compliance to evidence-based policies and practices for addressing and preventing all forms of sexual harassment and promoting a campus climate of civility and respect. 

Information about organizational membership, events, and resources is on the National Academies website.