Sebastião Salgado and Visual Sociology

This paper links the work of Sebastião Salgado, recipient of the 2010 American Sociological Association (ASA) Award for Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues, with the discipline of sociology. I reflect on Salgado’s biography, method, and concerns in order to demonstrate how his work contributes to the awareness and understanding of social issues. Toward this end, I summarize sociology’s record of involvement with visual documentation. Prior to 1915, the American Journal of Sociology regularly included photographs that provided visual documentation of environments under study. However, as sociology moved away from social reform activities and toward scientific investigation, the regular publication of photographs ceased. During the 1930s and 1940s, photographic projects in disciplines and social movements beyond sociology developed a variety of methods that would prove useful to sociology. During the 1970s, sociologists once again began to use visual methods in their teaching, research, and publication, putting sociology in the position to both contribute to and benefit from insights and social commitments that have distinguished Sebastião Salgado as a globally significant photographer and social activist during the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries.     

Using our brains to develop better policy

Current governmental practices often use a method called weight of evidence (WoE) to integrate and weigh different sources of information in the process of reaching a decision. Recent advances in cognitive neuroscience have identified WoE-like processes in the brain, and we believe that these advances have the potential to improve current decision-making practices. In this article, we describe five specific areas where knowledge emerging from cognitive neuroscience may be applied to the challenges confronting decisionmakers who manage risks: (1) quantifying evidence, (2) comparing the value of different sources of evidence, (3) reaching a decision, (4) illuminating the role of subjectivity, and (5) adapting to new information. We believe that the brain is an appropriate model for structuring decision-making processes because the brain's network is designed for complex, flexible decision making, and because policy decisions that must ultimately depend on human judgment will be best served by methods that complement human abilities. Future discoveries in cognitive neuroscience will likely bring further applications to decision practice.     

Explaining third-party success in gubernatorial elections: The cases of Alaska, Connecticut, Maine and Minnesota

In the 1990s alone, four states elected third-party governors. Walter Hickel of Alaska and Lowell Weicker of Connecticut were elected in 1990. Maine elected Angus King in 1994. And Jesse Ventura was elected governor of Minnesota in 1998. In this article, I examine these four cases in an attempt to identify the factors that contribute to third-party electoral success. I apply two models to these cases. The first model, “alternative culture,” holds that certain voters—regardless of specific context—are predisposed to support alternative candidates. The second model, “institutional context,” looks at factors such as name recognition, resources, and access to media as explanations of third-party success. I find that except for the influence of “partisan independence,” there is little evidence to support the persistence of an alternative culture of third-party voting. Rather, these four cases are linked by a context particularly favorable to these alternative candidates.