Reflections on the academic job search in sociology

Although a variety of resources exist to aid social scientists, in general, in their aca-demic job pursuits, almost no resources detail this process specifically for sociolo-gists. This research aims to provide a review of the literature on the academic job market and to provide a sociological analysis of the job searching process in sociology. We report and analyze the experiences of five sociologists as they moved from graduate school, post-doctoral fellowships, an applied research position, and a non-tenure track teaching position to assistant professor positions. We detail the importance of impression management and self-presentation throughout this process (by job candidates, departments, and administrators), the resources provided by the American Sociological Association that exist to aid job candidates, and we suggest implications of the current organization of the sociology job market.     

The woman writer's body: Multiplicity,neoliberalism, and feminist resistance

What goes behind the scene of a woman writer's writing process? Beneath shiny finished writing products lies an arduous writing process often remain unseen to readers. The article makes visible two women writers' bodies and our embodied writing experiences through an intersectional feminist lens. Writer One is a Singapore-born, ethnic Chinese, queer migrant woman academic residing in Australia with her long-term partner. Writer Two is an England-born, Australian-British dual citizen, white heterosexual married mother of young twin children ready to kick start her academic career after her recent PhD conferment. Writer One with her fibromyalgic, traumatized, and othered bodies and Writer Two with her vulvodynia, mothering, and gendered bodies write themselves, their bodies and embodied writing experiences into existence in this article. Using autoethnographic accounts, they discuss how their multiple, chronically ill, and pained bodies influence their writing process and choice of writing topics. Specifically, they reveal how their bodies negotiate the tension between neoliberal demands imposed on their bodies and their feminist resistance efforts against constrictive forces in the knowledge production economy. Using this piece of writing as feminist resistance, they seek to reject dominant discourses, hold space, inscribe their own narratives, and call for collective feminist action with fellow women writers.     

Problems in being responsive: Reflections on an evaluation of a program for training motorcycle riders

This paper discusses some methodological issues arising from an evaluation of the Queensland Road Safety Council Motorcycle Training Program. The basic orientation of the evaluation was responsive/illuminative; responsive in the sense that the evaluation proceeded interactively, with appropriate issues and procedures identified and modified progressively through direct observation of the program and discussion with the participants; illuminative in the sense that the final report attempted to provide a detailed account of the program operation and of its strengths and weaknesses as perceived by various stakeholders. An account is given of the main considerations in designing, implementing, and reporting the evaluation. Implications for future evaluations are discussed.     

Walking the tightrope: directing a student health center at a research institution with an academic medical center

Reporting lines for directors of student health centers (SHCs) at colleges and universities are a matter of continuing interest for those of us who must follow them. SHC directors at institutions with academic medical centers face a greater number of reporting choices that also have the potential of being more politically charged. The author describes his experience at 2 such institutions and offers some cautious advice.     

Working together to improve care: collaboration between a state psychiatric hospital and an academic institution

This article describes a collaboration between state mental health services division and a state university that focuses on the improvement of patient care services in state psychiatric hospitals. The collaboration is different from other initiatives linking state institutions and academia as it is composed of a team of psychiatrists, advanced practice nurses, and master's prepared psychiatric rehabilitation practitioners. The historical development and accomplishments are described and the process of working with a state psychiatric hospital is explored.     

The Never‐ending Shift: A feminist reflection on living and organizing academic lives during the coronavirus pandemic

This article offers a feminist reflection written as a nocturnal stream of consciousness exposing the embodied, emotional and professional experience of living and working during a pandemic outbreak. Framed within a feminist approach, this personal narrative provides an example of the effects of such unexpected and unprecedented circumstances on personal and professional academic lives. Developed during the first stage of the (inter)national coronavirus pandemic, my reflections address issues of privilege; emotional labour; the virtual invasion of the home space within the current increasingly ambiguous space of ‘the workplace'; workload; and wellbeing. Further, I consider how the newly enforced flexible work measures based on online tools have turned current work–life dynamics into a ‘Never‐ending Shift'.     

Rethinking youth voice and institutional power: Reflections from inside a service learning partnership in a California juvenile hall

This article shares the dilemmas that emerge from a community service project that engages students in a systematic critique of the juvenile justice system from the inside. It explores how competing images of youth (as dangerous thugs, vulnerable children and kids who have made bad choices) coexist uneasily within the juvenile justice system and significantly shape and constrain this community service learning project. They influence how volunteers understand their experiences and relationships with students inside, and they shape how young people in the system speak about their own lives, the inequalities they see around them, and the juvenile justice system itself. By exploring these dynamics this article aims to develop a more nuanced understanding of youth voice.     

Investigating the organizational everyday: a critical feminist approach

ABSTRACT

This article considers the possibilities and limits of applying institutional ethnography, a feminist theoretical and methodological approach that contributes to collective projects of investigating and transforming social life. Elaborating on the approach, the article reports on an ethnographic exploration of visual artists’ experiences and struggles in Canada's art world – a project that started from the standpoint of practising visual artists, examined their work and relations, and explicated practices and logics of art and valued work conditioning their lives. Speaking back to formal or text-based investigations of particular institutions, the article grapples with how to engage in research that more fully reveals the ‘social,’ attending to everyday life, to the ‘life work’ that people do, and to social forms that are threaded through intersecting, localized intimate and institutional spheres.     

Debating trans inclusion in the feminist movement: a trans-positive analysis

The debate over whether or not to allow, accept, and embrace transpeople as a segment of the feminist movement has been a tumultuous one that remains unresolved. Prominent authors have argued both sides of the dispute. This article analyzes the anti-inclusion feminist viewpoint and offers a trans-positive perspective for moving toward a potential resolution of the debate.     

Reflections on the intersection of power and competition in reflecting teams as applied to academic settings

This article explores the author's experiences with the concepts of power and competition as they intersect with aspects of reflecting team practices in academic settings. It draws upon Bishop's (2002) work, the elements of which are based on Starhawk's (1987) ideas of power with and power over. The article describes how competition and other power over practices of domination might unfold and intersect with reflecting-team practices. It is proposed that a power over practice, such as competition, which is prevalent in our society and universities, can be incompatible with the collaborative nature of reflecting teams. Suggestions for addressing the dissonance between the environment and reflecting team practice are offered.     

Australian women and foster care: a feminist perspective

Viewing biological and foster mothers through a feminist lens would make fostering a form of care in which both women would share. One agency has put this into practice. This article describes how both groups felt about the experience.     

Surviving the swamp: Using cognitive behavioural therapy in a social work setting

This paper explores the attempts of an adolescent support team working for South Gloucestershire Social Services, to integrate Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) into its practice. We explain how we, as a team, undertook a year-long course of study in CBT and discuss the advantages and difficulties we encountered. Then, beginning with a case study, we draw out the limitations of trying to use CBT in a social work setting. We focus specifically on how the complications of wider family systems will often compromise individual therapeutic work with young people and conclude that a more pragmatic approach to CBT is required in social work, rather than attempts to replicate work carried out in the clinical setting.     

Durkheim's theories of deviance and suicide: a feminist reconsideration.

In The division of labor in society, Durkheim conceptualizes deviance as an essentially asocial phenomenon, and he conceptualizes "woman" as an essentially asocial being. Both theories contradict Durkkheim's characteristic social determinism, and both encounter, in Suicide, two further contradictions. First, Suicide demonstrates conclusively that relatively asocial individuals, women, are actually much less prone to deviance than relatively social individuals, men. Second, Suicide introduces the theory that deviance is an essentially social phenomenon that is produced by pathological social forces or "currents" rather than by "excessive individualization" and "insufficient socialization." Durkkheim's second theory of deviance thus simultaneously rescues his theory of the social nature of men and his theory of the asocial nature of women.     

Essential emotions: The place of passion in a feminist network

Using a case study, the authors argue that emotions play a highly significant part in voluntary organizations, and that present significant part in voluntary organizations, and that present academic approaches to emotions are unhelpful, both theoretically and practically. The distinction between emotional work and emotional labor is unclear in nonprofit organizations using volunteers. More research is needed in this area.     

Women and the illness role: rethinking feminist theory

Une femme adopte le rôle de malade. Comment analyser ce phénomène? Je propose dans les pages qui suivent une théorie féministe de L'adoption du rôle de malade qui met L'accent sur des formes culturelles et phénoménologiques d'investigation. Diverses auteures féministes ont récemment traité ce problème en soulignant comment le contrôle social patriarcal sur les femmes peut s'exercer par la définition même des maladies. Mais les études produites dans ce cadre ont tendance à négliger la façon dont les femmes vivent les maladies ainsi définies. Ces études sont alors incapables de comprendre pourquoi certains types de maladies - le syndrome pré-menstruel, par exemple - acquièrent une crédibilité certaine, alors que d'autres dont 1'étiologie et la symptomatologie sont similaires demeurent dans I'ombre. Un paradigme plus étoffé du comportement de malade, comme celui proposé ici, examinerait de plus près la relation entre structure sociale et expérience sociale de la maladie, ainsi qu'entre idéologie et biographie. En dernière analyse, je propose un paradigme qui explore la désignation des maladies à trois niveaux d'analyse: 1/les activités productrices des groupes dominants qui ont un intérêt politique ou commercial dans la désignation médicale; 2/ les activités productrices de celles et ceux qui adoptent la désignation; et 3/ les trajets ou déterminants culturels qui prédisposent L'adoption collective de certains types de maladies à L'exclusion de certaines autres. This paper advances a feminist theory of women and illness behaviour which places a stronger emphasis on cultural and phenomenological forms of investigation. Current theoretical treatments of this topic by feminist scholars focus on how definitions of illness may be viewed as patriarchal forms of social control of women. Rarely do such studies investigate the personal experience of women adopting the illness role. As a result, such approaches fail to articulate how it is that some categories of illness, such as the premenstrual syndrome, come to be credited with plausibility, while others similar in aetiology and symptomatology, are ignored. A more comprehensive paradigm of illness behaviour as suggested by this paper would explore, more fully, the relationship between social structure and the social experience of illness; between ideology and personal biography. Ultimately, the paradigm suggested here explores illness labelling at three levels of investigation: 1/ the productional activities of dominant groups with commercial and/or political self-interests in medical labelling; 2/ the productional activities of those adopting the label; and 3/ the cultural pathways or determinants which predispose the collective adoption of some illness categories, and not others.