Uncategorized – scatterplot

boycotting asa & learning from other academic boycott campaigns

I will not be attending the American Sociological Association annual meeting this year. I am sad to miss the chance to catch up with friends and colleagues and to participate in a couple fantastic panels. But in the end, the choice was easy. ASA has made it clear that they are using procedure as a weapon to undermine democracy within the association. I stand with Sociologists 4 Palestine and their call to boycott.

what do you do when your university president hits two protesters with his car?

Asking for a friend. (I’m the friend.) So, as many of you may have heard, Cornell President Kotlikoff hit two people with his car on April 30th. One was a student, one a recent alum, both members of a group called Students for a Democratic Cornell that has been pressuring the administration to restore an independent campus judiciary and end the use of harsh sanctions against non-violent protesters. A group of five people (3 students & 2 alums, I believe) walked out of an event with Kotlikoff and asked him questions about the repression of campus protesters and free speech on campus. Kotlikoff got in his car, waited a few seconds, and then backed out into one person and ran over the foot of another. The whole thing was caught on video.

The next day, Kotlikoff sent an email to the entire campus lying about the incident (claiming, for example, that they were banging on his window, and not mentioning that he hit anyone). Two weeks later, the Board of Trustees reported the results of a hasty “independent” investigation by campus police (who report to Kotlikoff) which (surprise!) exonerated Kotlikoff of any wrongdoing and blamed the protesters. Here, I’ll provide some links that summarize the events and the responses.

a racist’s idea of anti-racism; a sexist’s idea of feminism

One of the many recent horrifying stories about American academia this year has been the crackdown on teaching and research about race & racism and especially sex, gender, & sexuality at Texas Tech. Inside Higher Ed covered an earlier 2025 version here, Erin in the Morning covered an April update here. The full memo laying out Texas Tech’s new policy is available here and makes an interesting, if disturbing, read.

study on sexual misconduct in sociology

Below is recruitment info for a study being conducted by Theresa Morris of Texas A&M on sexual misconduct in sociology. Please share widely!

learning from the aaa boycott

In 2023, the American Anthropological Association passed a boycott resolution very similar (though not identical) to the one proposed by Sociologists 4 Palestine. Some of the materials produced by the AAA campaign are useful to read in light of the debates happening within ASA right now about what a boycott would or wouldn’t mean in practice. I hadn’t seen these resources before and I thought they might be new and useful to many of you as well. Below, I’ll provide some links and excerpts.

guest post: the sociologist as bystander

The following is a guest post by Roi Livne and an anonymous co-author.

They called them “aid distribution centers.” Orwell himself would not have thought of a better term. Every day, shortly after they opened, Dr. Mark Brauner, a U.S. emergency physician who was volunteering at Nasser Hospital in the Gaza Strip, heard

ambulances flying toward the hospital, private vehicles, donkey-drawn carts bringing in people, streams after streams of people. They often have isolated gunshot wounds to their head, to their neck, in the very center of their chest. […] We’re seeing lots of children, adolescents, teenagers. We’re seeing some older people. But it’s really more execution-style than the typical blast injuries that we see, which tend to be more multisystemic, like head, neck, chest and abdomen with shrapnel. These are really isolated, targeted types of injuries that are much more consistent with the firsthand reports that we’re getting and a lot of the video and that we’re watching from the so-called food distribution centers, where it’s kind of like a perverted Squid Games, where they’re giving a certain period of time to get the aid. If there’s any chaos, then they just start opening fire. And then, we see it in our facility 20, 30 minutes later.^[1]

Less than a year later, a group of sociologists is petitioning in support of the ASA President’s decision to disallow members to vote on what they define as a “deeply contested” and “complex political question.” The group is not lacking in academic acumen and credentials. Among them is at least one member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of our favorite scholars of the U.S. right wing, a brilliant gender scholar who served as ASA president, and two prominent economic sociologists.^[2] The list is getting longer as we write. All agree that the ASA should not take a position on issues that fall “outside most members’ areas of expertise”, because this “would place sociologists in the position of being asked, collectively, to endorse the exclusion of colleagues based on nationality.”

Let us start with the last accusation. It is false. Sociologists for Palestine’s resolution does not call to exclude colleagues based on their nationality. The allegation is especially puzzling because the petition’s initial description of the resolution is accurate: “[a] motion to boycott Israeli universities and organizations” [emphasis ours]. Sociologists for Palestine have clarified the difference between boycotting individuals and boycotting institutions multiple times, in the FAQs on their website and in endless exchanges on social media. But don’t trust them. Read the language of the resolution and decide for yourself.

asa should hold an advisory vote on bds

As most readers of this blog likely know*, the American Sociological Association (ASA) is in the midst of a crisis. Earlier this year, Sociologists 4 Palestine (S4P) submitted a petition signed by 428 sociologists calling on ASA to hold a membership vote on whether to boycott Israeli academic institutions. The full text of the proposed resolution is here. ASA leadership responded with a letter arguing that the proposed resolution exceeded the scope of what membership resolutions were allowed to address:

All of the proposed actions are governance matters related to ASA business operations and are therefore not petitionable. Only ASA Council can make decisions regarding ASA operational and governance matters.

This reading of the ASA bylaws is disputed (see S4P’s response here) but many seem convinced by it (see, for example, response to a recent sectionwide survey in the Environmental Sociology section, one of many sections to have polled members on their response to the situation**). Let’s, for a moment, take ASA’s reading at face value and as correct. The petition, as submitted, would be invalid as a binding membership vote. What should ASA do?

what do ai and trump have in common? or, on how charisma narrows our conversations

::dusts off the blog::

Hi everyone! Things have been a bit quiet here at scatterplot. I wish we could say the same for the rest of the world. Instead, things have been very, very loud.

Right now, President Trump is threatening to commit war crimes against Iran after the initial failures of his illegal war. Every day has felt like this for a year. I was just in a meeting for a new paper collaboration and we joked about how surreal it feels to plan to write something that might, if all goes well, come out in 2028 when it’s not clear there will even be a 2028. And yet, what else are we to do?

One reason I’ve been blogging less* is that our collective public conversations in 2026 seem to fixate on basically two topics: Trump and AI. Many have noted how climate change has fallen off the agenda, for example.** One of the best essays I’ve read in a long time is about both Trump & AI and it helped me make sense out of why those two topics have so dominated conversations, and why that’s so frustrating.

performative has become a contranym

The term “performative” has become a contranym (a word with two directly opposed meanings) and it’s causing a lot of confusion. In social theory, “performative” typically means “bringing something into being through speech/action.” In contemporary political discourse, performative typically means “being just for show, not creating any real change.” I’m writing this post because I’ve had to leave some version of the same set of comments on far too many student papers who seem to not always realize the tension. Let me explain a bit more.

it’s the interface

A whole lot of people – including computer scientists who should know better and academics who are usually thoughtful – are caught up in fanciful, magical beliefs about chatbots. Any sufficiently advanced technology and all that. But why chatbots specifically? Not all ‘generative AI’ or even all LLMs spark so much anthropomorphization and attributions of ‘general intelligence.’ It wasn’t StableDiffusion’s image generator or GPT-2 that excited this imagination. We don’t see much anthropomorphization for the latest versions of Copilot (a code generator) or Suno (a song generator), either. It was ChatGPT. Now often it’s character.ai.

Instruction tuning, and later chat tuning, are the methodological innovations that make some machine learning pass the Turing Test. An object that we can use imperative language with (“write me an email…”) seems to have captured imaginations in ways that other, frankly better, objects don’t.

>5000 faculty from around the country call on academic leaders to resist

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Faculty From 14 Universities Join Forces to Call on Administrative Bodies to Stand Up to Attacks on Higher Education

Nearly 5,100 Faculty From 14 Universities Call on University Administrations to Stand Up to Attacks on Democratic Principles

Cambridge, MA – April 17th, 2025 – Faculty from fourteen universities across the United States signed and released letters calling for their respective university’s administrative bodies to stand up to the Trump administration’s attacks on academic freedom, freedom of inquiry, and other democratic principles. Nearly 5,100 faculty have collectively signed these letters on what the American Association of University Professors has called a Day of Action for Higher Ed. This is a collaborative effort independently organized by passionate faculty across four universities – Professor Ryan Enos from Harvard University; Professor Gerry Leonard from Boston University; Professor Brian Cleary from Boston University; Professor Daniel Laurison from Swarthmore College; and Professor Dan Hirschman from Cornell University – to encourage leadership at higher education institutions to stand up and fight back against the anti-democratic attacks of the federal government.

somehow, scientific racism returned

This week, Trump issued a new executive order: “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” NPR has a short story about the order here.

The direct targets of the order are the Smithsonian Museums in DC and how they portray American history. The order attacks both diversity and trans people (among other things). (Aside: the President is not directly in charge of the Smithsonian, and so the real effect of this order – like many of Trump’s executive orders – is in question/remains to be seen.) One less reported aspect of the order, but one that’s frightening for what it signals about the arguments the administration is prepared to advance, is that the order also argues for scientific racism (sometimes called biological racism or racial realism).* Here’s the relevant text from a criticism of a specific exhibit:

For example, the Smithsonian American Art Museum today features “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” an exhibit representing that “[s]ocieties including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.” The exhibit further claims that “sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism” and promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating “Race is a human invention.”

speaking out for democracy and us higher education

A group of scholars worked to write the below open letter. Please consider signing & sharing – we’re over 1800 signatures at the time of posting here, and we’re hoping for a lot more to help pressure universities to stand up for academic freedom!

Speaking Out for Democracy and US Higher Education

To add your name to this statement, go to https://bit.ly/DemocracyAndHigherEdSign

We publicly affirm our commitment to the enterprise of higher education in a democratic and free society, and to the values and practices that facilitate the production, advancement, and sharing of knowledge. Given the continuous and escalating attacks on higher education along with many other pillars of American democracy by the Trump administration and its allies, we call on colleges and universities to protect these values.

submit to the 2025 junior theorists symposium!

2025 Junior Theorists Symposium–Call for Précis

SUBMIT YOUR PRÉCIS HERE
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: March 21, 2025, 11:59pm Eastern Time

The 19th Junior Theorists Symposium (JTS) is now open to new submissions. The JTS is a conference featuring the work of emerging sociologists engaged in theoretical work, broadly defined. Sponsored in part by the Theory Section of the ASA, the conference has provided a platform for the work of early-career sociologists since 2005. We especially welcome submissions that broaden the practice of theory beyond its traditional themes, topics, and disciplinary function.

the future of the democratic party is queer

Last week, Gallup released new data on the demographics of LGBTQ+ folks in the United States. Tristan Bridges has a fantastic write-up here with nice visualizations. Some key highlights include the overall growth of LGBTQ+ identification as well as some compositional shifts (like the fact that non-college educated people are now more likely to identify as not straight, and the continued trend of many more women identifying as LGBTQ+ than men, and especially as bi).

One thing that jumped out at me was the data on partisanship combined with the data on age. If I’m looking at it right, something like 35% of young Democrats identify as LGBTQ+. Here’s the back of the envelope math: