Author: Albert S. Fu

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Why I Study Cities

Splatter Compass

A version/part of this post was presented during the Second Annual Conference on Social Work in the Global Environment at Kutztown University on March 26, 2014. The presentation was entitled “The Global City as Level of Analysis: Connecting the Local and the Global.” As a globally oriented sociologist with concerns for social justice, I do not see social processes and movements as being just local or tied to specific nation-states. Rather, for me the local is always global, and the global is always local. This was the underlying premise of my presentation and this blog post on why I study cities.

Why am I interested in cities? As a product of SUNY Binghamton’s sociology program, I was trained in world-systems. World-systems is a multidisciplinary large-scale long-term approach that emerged in the 1970s and was a preceded the popularization of globalization studies. However, I was never particularly comfortable with the macro-level global approach of world-systems. Without going too much into my intellectual autobiography, my draw to cities is that it is a level of analysis that intersects the local and the global. Specifically, I wanted a more nuanced level of analysis than the nation-state.  Why is the nation-state a problem? Perhaps the best example is the problem of poor regions of “core” counties in comparison to urban centers in semi-peripheral and peripheral counties. While there are no doubt high levels of poverty in cities in the Global South, such cities have amenities that are indistinguishable from that of major cities in the developed world – amenities that poor regions of the core lack. Central business districts, university campuses, golf courses, gated communities, and other elite amenities. This makes urban areas, and in particular alpha or primate cities (the largest city in a region or country), different economically, politically and culturally (as well as environmentally) from the rest of the country. Cities and their relationship to the rest of the country, and in comparison to other nation-states become a useful tool in understanding the larger (global) problem of uneven development. After all, more than half the world’s population live in urban areas – which are very much the product of transnational economic activity and migration.

Of course, urban poverty in the developed and less developed world are not the same thing. However, I believe that urban comparisons are more comparable when using economic indicators like GDP and social indicators to discuss inequality between different places (than at the national level). Moreover, an examination of cities, allows us to discuss the way in which inequality reproduces itself through local as well as global processes. Cities, and more specifically global cities, are a manifestation of the world-economy (which includes the modern world-system) (Knox & Taylor, 1995). London, Tokyo and New York look the way that they do thanks to the way they are connected to other cities – through migration, trade and other forms of social, economic, and political exchange (Friedmann, 1986; Sassen, 2001). More significantly, we see that it’s not just cities in core countries that fit this description of “Global.” Kuala Lumpur, Istanbul, Mumbai, Johannesburg, and Rio de Janiero are all cities very much linked to international finance, multinational corporations, the transnational business class and immigrant communities.When we look at something like immigration, we see similar “pull” factors between cities, because these are nodal points of the world-economy.

At the same time, we can look at such cities with much more nuance than just products of globalization. We can look at individuals, local groups (such as immigrant communities), and “micro”-level social actors that are more than just products of macro level phenomenon (or a top down approach). Rather they are active agents in the shaping of their social worlds within the cities they live and operate in. This is key. In global cities, we can talk about their agency in trade, global social movements, and cultural production. Cities and their citizens are active within transnational networks, which means that they are active participants in the processes of globalization. The best example of this is remittances. It is estimated that over $500 billion are sent to home countries by immigrants. This money not only goes into consumer goods, but family businesses and construction projects that fundamentally shape urban landscapes around the world (Lopez, 2010). Immigrants and diasporic communities in shape cities as much as the cities shape and structure their lives. Cities, after all, are homes. Cities are work places. People have emotional connections to place, whether they love or hate where they live. I would argue that environment, social context, and location come together in very important ways that explain the reproduction of social structure (a very sociological concern). It is, after all, social structure that creates and reproduces inequality.

Many urban communities are global and the spaces they occupy are global. In global cities elite spaces – gated communities – are constructed alongside sites of oppression and poverty – the favelas, banlieu, township, ghetto. Both spaces are the product of migration, draconian public policy, the push of aggressive real estate developers, as well as environmental degradation. Not only are they sites of destruction and inequality, but they are sites in which social justice is fought for. The existence of both spaces, reveal the urban nature of local and global social justice struggles. French sociologist and theorist Henri Lefebvre (1996) used the term “right to the city” to refer to the human right and dignity people should have within the world’s most common “lived” space – the city.  David Harvey (2008, 2010. 2012) in his classic work Social Justice and the City and later works have argued that cities are sites of struggle. As such, there is no doubt in my mind that cities embody and contain many of the local and global struggles that people face.

Work Cited:

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Back to School: Desire2Learn Tips

Splatter Backpack

This was originally posted on the KU Converge website.

It’s back to school time. Despite the semester starting last week, I’m still making last minute tweaks to my courses on Desire2Learn. This blog post is dedicated to the various tricks I’ve developed over the last few years. It’s a solid learning management system that has lots of useful functions if you know how to access and use them. I’m hoping that these tips not only help make your courses more effective, but it saves you time in grading, organizing content, and even assessing program goals.


1. Online Test and Quiz Security

Randomizing your questions in a single folder is not enough. There are problems with balance between chapters and cheating in the form of so-called buddy testing. Essentially, I try to make it difficult or inconvenient for a student to ask a friend to take the exam for them.

  • I always have the exam scheduled for regular class time. This is particularly important when there are multiple sections of the same class.
  • I have a mandatory question where the student enters their student ID number. Not only does this make it more difficult for the student to have another student login for them, the results for this question can be downloaded (for all students) as an Excel file and compared to student ID numbers in the class roster in a separate spreadsheet column.
  • I have more questions in the test bank than the number I actually have on the exam. The more you have the less likely two students will have the same exam.
  • The key to having a balanced exam (e.g. having all chapters covered evenly) is to have multiple random folders.

2. Export Statistics is Your Friend

Being able to export results/statistics from quizzes, discussions and surveys is an incredibly useful tool. I teach large classes with over 100 students. So for participation points, I typically have students discuss various topics on D2L as homework. In order to give them simple participation points such as a simple complete, incomplete or zero, I export the statistics on a discussion topic and then re-import them into the gradebook using Excel make sure the file is formatted correctly.

  • See below on how exporting statistics can be use for assessment purposes.

3. Peer Review for Papers Online

Using the group dropbox, you can have students review each other’s work. This worked out pretty well in an online course recently. Simply put students (or the whole class) in a group, and then assign that group a dropbox that allows multiple submissions. Everyone should be able to see all the submitted papers, including Turnitin scores if that function is turned on. If the class is online, you can then have the students discuss and critique papers via the discussion forums.

4. HTML and custom CSS

For faculty that enjoy customizing their course content, you can upload web content directly (such as HTML files). You can’t upload JavaScript, but you can use custom CSS stylesheets. Yes, you can keep your course content simple. However, using a little CSS can make important material “pop” a lot more, as students go over outlines, summaries, etc. For instance, you can have different mouse roll over effects or even a simple menu in place.

5. Surveys for Assessment

At present, the sociology program is using D2L to assess senior portfolios. Each semester graduating seniors submit a pdf of their writing to a D2L course where all sociology faculty are listed as instructors.  Each faculty member fills out an anonymous survey on the student’s work via D2L. This saves time in that it allows me to compile and average scores quickly and efficiently. D2L also allows us to easily notify the student of the outcome.

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Post-Dissertation Research Trajectory

handwritingAs I write my tenure and promotion application letter that recaps what I’ve done, I’m also thinking a great deal about where my career will be going. Raul Pacheco-Vega has blogged a bit about his own trajectory. So I figured, I’d spend #ScholarSunday (Pacheco-Vega’s creation) doing a bit of writing on my own trajectory.

For some of us PhDs, we have a love and hate relationship with our dissertation. It was our ticket to being called “doctor.” It led to publications that helped us get jobs and advance our careers. However, we are often sick of it (and possibly the topic) once we’ve squeezed what we can out of it. Yet, moving on is hard. I was recently talking to a colleague of mine and she expressed concern about future research once everything in her dissertation was published. Moving on to a new project is often scary and intimidating.

I actually haven’t thought much about my dissertation for the past 2-3 years. My trajectory is (maybe) different from others though. There were a number of ideas that I had when I was starting my dissertation that were not feasible for a number of reasons. As such, I had a U.S. (or California) -centric dissertation on architecture and culture despite being trained in globalization and global cities. After getting a few articles out of my dissertation, I started moving on to a very different area of study. While my recent work on wildfire comes out of a very brief section of my dissertation, it was essentially a new project that required a lot of new research. I basically had to train myself in environmental sociology. Since then, I’ve been working on global urban and environmental issues rather than culture and built environment. Also, visiting Turkey and Ethiopia the last two summers have allowed me to explore new angles to look at the connection between environment urbanization, but in a way, I’m returning to my roots as a Binghamton Sociology trained scholar.

This shift (or return) led to a bit of awkwardness at the American Sociological Association (ASA) meeting last week. When asked what I work on, I struggled to find an answer. I think for the time being, the simplest explanation is that I look at the “intersection between built and natural environments in the U.S. and globally.” Six years ago, if a time traveler had told me that this was my future, I’d have been shocked.

I’m not sure if this trajectory makes me look unfocused, but I think my short attention span and desire to constantly work on different topics keeps my intellectual curiosity strong. Loving learning is what brought me here, and I still get excited when I learn something new. So hopefully, this excitement can inspire many more years of research and writing. After all, I’m still an early career researcher / scholar.

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Reflections on Addis Ababa, Urbanization and Globalization

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20140722_093946

I’m currently back in Addis Ababa after teaching in Gondar and visiting Bahir Dar. After spending about 2 weeks here in Ethiopia, here are some of my thoughts (or some brainstorming for future research) in my last 24 hrs here in Ethiopia.

When I first read Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums in graduate school in 2007, I noticed a table using United Nations data that suggested at 99.4% of Ethiopia’s urban population resided in “slums.” In comparison, neighboring Sudan had 85.7%. Another point of comparison for my friends who are reading this blog entry, Turkey had a 42.6% slum population. At the time, I couldn’t help but think that the percentage for Ethiopia made no sense, unless one is only using very Western definitions of urbanization and slums. Informal settlement would be a better term. This is why AbdouMaliq Simone in his introduction to Urban Africa discusses the importance of  local social practice and organization as the lens to use when examining cities in Africa. If one uses terms such as percent urbanized a great deal of nuance is overlooked. For example, according to the World Bank, Ethiopia’s urban population had only grown from 15% in 2000 to 18% (of ~91.7 million) in 2013. Addis Ababa represents about half that percentage. Similarly, according to the World Bank the percent of Ethiopia’s urban population in the same time period with improved sanitation only improved from 22% to 27%. In other words, there appears to not have been a great deal of “urbanization” or “development” is taking place given those numbers.

However, there have been dramatic urban transformations in recent years. For instance, Wendel Cox at New Geography has looked that the evolving urban form of Addis Ababa. There clearly is urbanization taking place. There are unavoidable new construction projects in many areas of the city, especially around Bole. Streets are torn up for Chinese backed transit projects such as a new boulevard in commemoration of the African Union’s 50th anniversary in 2013 and a massive (elevated) light rail project projected to open in 2015. The Chinese Communications Construction Company was given a 1.5 billion dollar contract for the light rail project. More recently a Turkish firm was given a major road construction contract. In other words, there’s a massive transformation going on that is re-shaping the city. It’s not uncommon to see “shacks” adjacent to new buildings. I’ve seen several vacated communities of shacks made of earth, corrugated steel, and other materials next to new development of multi-story concrete apartment buildings as one travels from Bole to the old Piazza area of Addis. 

There’s a very interesting story regarding globalization and urbanization here to be told (or will be unfolding), since outside of Bole, there isn’t a strong (Western) multinational corporation presence in the visual urban landscape. However, behind the scenes, in the periphery, factories by Chinese and Turkish firms are being built. Billboards for Arçelik appliances in English, or a Turkish restaurant with Ethiopian staff blasting American hip-hop, as well as authentic Chinese banquet hall style restaurants and shoe shine boys have greeting me in Mandarin reveal an amazing social-cultural tapestry (amidst the extreme inequality) as well as the dynamics of the so-called South-South economic expansion. 

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Summer Travels and Teaching Overseas

PassportLast summer I taught at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey and this summer I’ll be headed to the University of Gondar in Ethiopia. As I get ready for departure, I want to do a blog post on teaching overseas.

Although, I cringe when people call me a “teacher” (since I’m a researcher as well), teaching is very important to me. I enjoy being at a teaching oriented institution. However, I’m often jealous of friends and colleagues at research institutions who have resources and schedules that make going abroad easier. In the absence of those resources, teaching overseas during the summer is a great opportunity to both develop myself as a teacher and conduct research. Importantly, working with students overseas makes me something other than a tourist. While, I don’t horribly mind being a tourist (sometimes), being one certainly limits you. As a social scientist, it’s important to have first hand knowledge that isn’t filtered through pre-packaged vacations. I don’t want to just visit places, I want to get to know as much about a society as possible.

I teach and write on globalization and cities, as such, being able to live and work in other parts of the world (even if briefly) is vital to my intellectual and professional growth. As Donald Hall writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the benefits of teaching abroad include “important pedagogical, research-related, and life lessons.” It allows me to bring experiences back into the classroom and it informs my research writing. Overseas teaching not only gives me intimate knowledge of places and people, but forces me to critically think about the material I teach or write about.

From the standpoint of research, I was able to meet with colleagues (old and new) to share ideas last summer in Istanbul. I also learned a great deal from my students. My time there led to two article manuscripts and a new perspective on the city’s dramatic growth since my first visit in 2006 (and subsequent visits in 2008 and 2011). Perhaps most interesting was being able to teach an environmental sociology course amidst the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul.

This summer, I’ll be visiting Ethiopia for the first time. This trip will greatly support my ongoing work on global urban development issues. While most of my time will be in Gondar, I’m looking forward to seeing Addis Ababa. As an urbanist, it’s always interesting to see different types of cities. I’m hoping to learn about the city and the country, as well as examine the connections that shape different types of urbanism around the world.

Follow my trip via this blog and my twitter account.

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Prepping for Fall 2014: Visualizing School Closures

Splatter Compass

compassIn my previous post, I mentioned that I spend a lot of time during the summer prepping for academic year. This fall requires extra work because I’m changing textbooks, and re-organizing a lot of material. I’m not doing this just to improve the content or my teaching, but I do this to “exercise” my other skills – things like playing with Google Fusion Tables, Photoshop, HTML, etc.

This fall I’ll be teaching urban sociology again and I’m currently updating material for the course. New on the syllabus for this year is Robert Sampson’s book on Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. Reading the book the past few weeks inspired me to think of examples to help students make comparisons/connections between Chicago and Philadelphia.

Perhaps the most obvious example is that were both hit bad with school closures in 2013 affected whole communities.

Chicago Philadelphia
School Closings 2013 47 23
Students Displaced 12,700 10,000
Layoffs 2,000 3,700
Charter Schools opened 15 9

The Chicago Tribune has an excellent map that illustrates some of social and economic dimensions of neighborhoods affected by the closures. Since, I’m very much in favor of visualizing data for my statistics-adverse students, I’ve decided to make my own map in Google Fusion Tables to help me with my lesson plan in the fall. I can always use Social Explorer, but it’s also useful and fun for me go through the effort of downloading U.S. Census data and making my own map.

The below is a color coded map of census tracts based on the percent of those with high school diplomas or higher based. The purple flags are where the schools closed in 2013 are located.

[Click for Map w/ Race & Income]

In particular, the consequences for school closures have dramatically affected communities of color. The Root reports that while African-American Students represent 58% of the students in Philadelphia, they made up 81% of the students affected by the closures. In Chicago, black students account for 43% of all students, but 87 of those affected. In this map, I’ve set it up so that you can toggle layers to look at race, income, and education attainment, so that you can see the connection between race and school closures. Setting up the toggle was fun it required playing around with JavaScript. For more simple layered maps, I use the Fusion Tables Layer Wizard. However, I wanted to create something that was more interactive that students could play around with. This required trying to find a color scheme for the maps so that when you toggle layers, they interact with one another in a way that is visually informative.

I’ll continue to work on this throughout the summer, but I wanted to blog on how summer “prep” work isn’t just revising lectures and reading. It can be an opportunity to develop other skills.

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Summer Writing

handwritingIts summer time, which means I can get a lot of work done without the distraction of student emails, service work, and other things that take my attention away from research. So I’ve decided to devote this entry to my writing regimen.

In an Inside Higher Ed article, Hollis Phelps discussed how he’s been able to continue doing research at a teaching focused institution. While a very positive piece, many of the commentators below the article had harsh words for him, claiming impossible workloads as a barrier to getting writing done. The reality is scholarly writing is difficult and graduate school is generally a poor training ground for it. So, in the last year, a few people have asked how I’ve managed to publish while teaching a 4/4 load with no TA support. Or how I can write, teach, grade, and be involved without a 60 hour work week? So, I’ve decided to write this blog post on my writing process.

First, I think it’s important to get a few things out-of-the-way. I’m privileged to have a tenure track job. I have a PhD adviser and other colleagues to co-publish with. This either isn’t the case for those in fields where co-authorship is less common. Also, having a spouse that’s a graduate student in a social science field helps. I have ready access to a proofreader. I’m also lucky in that I teach courses related to my research. In other words, I’m privileged to have resources and be in a situation that others are not.

It also helps to have a writing strategy. When I was working on my second comprehensive exam (area paper) in graduate school, I realized that reading and writing at odd hours was not working for me. I also couldn’t wait for inspiration to hit me. The reality is scholarly work is my job, and I should treat it as such. Every moment in front of the computer should be productive. Of course, this is all easier said than done, so these are my 5 strategies for staying on task when writing:

  1. Know Thyself. It’s important to know what works and doesn’t work for you. I tend to write better before sunset. I also tend to work best if I devote 2-3 hours a day solely to new writing. I tend to write less junk that requires a lot of revision if I work while in that zone. So once my time is up, I move on to other work (like revision, course prep, reading, etc). Finally, I write better in my office than at home. This was my discovery in graduate school, and I’ve stuck to it ever since.
  2. Organization (daily and annually). Once you know what works for you, you need to organizeyourselfaccordingly.
    • Daily. Take advantage of the time that you have. Every minute is valuable to me. I not only organize my day to optimize my writing time, but I keep my notes, files, and references organized. It’s completely ridiculous to not use citation management software like EndNote and Zotero! I also organize my day like a typical 9-5 job, this allows me have a routine that includes time to clear my head when I get home from work (see below). In other words, being organized helps me balance work and leisure – both of which are important.
    • Annually. I don’t have a 60 hour work week because I work all year round. Summers are when I do 90% of my course prep for the next academic year. This saves me a lot of stress during the academic year. It’s also when I’m able to have distraction-free writing time year round.
  3. Routine and Discipline. Writing is a craft. You have to keep working at. It’s also not easy. As mentioned above, I write best in the morning. If this means I need to wake up earlier to get an hour of writing in before my 8 or 9 am class, then I get up earlier. If I’m not traveling during the summer, I try to go my office 2-3 days a week (or more). Being disciplined about your routine helps you stayed organized, which in turn helps you have time for your life outside of academia.
  4. Clearing your head. Something that helps me stay focused for those 2-3 hour blocks of time is making sure I feel refreshed mentally. I do very little writing at home. This allows me to recharge my mind before re-opening that Word document again the next day. I also devote a lot of time to mindless pursuits like television and video games. During the summer when I have more time, I go to the gym a lot. I shut down the academic part of my brain when doing these things. This keeps me from burning out. Some people can breathe academic work 24-7. I can’t, so I don’t.
  5. Learning to let go. I have way too many friends and colleagues who hold back their work. They think that an extra month of revision will help them perfect their work, and this ends up being month after month of delays. Part of knowing thyself is knowing that you’ve done all that you can on the manuscript (such as editing, proofreading, double checking sources and data, sharing with colleagues, etc.). Once you’ve done all you can, it’s in the hands of editors and referees (or advisers and committee members). The reality is that the peer review process inevitably yields some sort of criticism you have to deal with or some other kind of revision. This means there’s a time where you have to let go and trust that you submitted the best work possible.

What I’ve written above is what’s worked for me the last decade or so. It might not work for you, but nonetheless it’s useful to learn how to work with your strengths and around your weaknesses.

Good luck reaching your summer writing goals.

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Thinking About Summer Reading

Splatter Reading

ReadingAs we approach summer, many of my professor and teacher friends are posting on their summer reading plans. Also, several of my friends have been posting this piece on reclaiming reading for leisure and enlightenment via Facebook. In many ways, all of this echoes the things that Neil Gaiman has said about reading. Essentially, that reading fiction for leisure is good. I agree. I also don’t think people (and especially young people) read enough. However, I want to offer my own very different personal trajectory as a reader and suggest that we all read for different reasons. Also, I’d like to argue that we all read for different things as well and that we shouldn’t idealize certain approaches to reading.

This past winter, while staying at my parent’s house, I showed Hande my writing assignments from grades 5 to 10. In that folder, there were papers on Constantine the Great, Lord of the Flies, Shakespeare’s plays, the American Civil War, To Kill a Mockingbird, the history of Iraq, and nuclear power. She remarked it was very clear I was meant to be a social scientist as my English assignments weren’t nearly as good as my “social studies” papers. In response, I said that I never liked “literature” anyway. My comment that day wasn’t completely true. I grew up reading a lot. My family had a set of abridged version classics such as Moby Dick, several works of Dickens, Mutiny on the Bounty, Black Beauty, and the work of Mark Twain that I read while in elementary school and junior high. I also read fantasy novels and had a love for Greek mythology. I remember enjoying The Great Brain series of books. Yet, it felt easy for my say that I didn’t like “literature.”

As literature lover, Hande was horrified by my response. She demanded that I never say such a horrible thing again. I reacted by re-igniting our longstanding argument over Catcher in the Rye. I hated the book and still consider it a waste of $8 (I read it for the first time 8 years ago on a boat ride from Turkey to Italy). She loved the book and we’ve been arguing about this for years. I’ve only recently come to understand the reason for this disagreement. We read books differently. She likes the characters – Holden, his teacher and sister Phoebe. However, the Catcher in the Rye has none of the things I look for in book – history, politics and details of social life/structure.

As a kid reading the abridged version of Oliver Twist or even watching the musical Oliver! I don’t think I ever thought much of the characters. Today, the characters are a blur. What stood out and continues to stands out to me were the conditions that the characters lived in. Orphanages and workhouses stand out in my memory more than individual characters. As I reflect upon the many books I’ve read, in general it’s not the characters or even story I remember. In Moby Dick, I was more fascinated by whaling more than with the characters. I remember harpoons and blubber, not Ahab’s obsession. In The Great Brain series, I was most interested in the technicalities of toilets being installed in the “frontier” West. The practical economic realities of collecting money from a fountain to live in a museum is one of the few things I still remember in the From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. I don’t even remember why the kids were in the museum.

There’s magic in reading. However, for me the magic was never found in larger than life characters or the idea of adventure and fantasy. The magic for me was being able to see the past come alive, or how society worked. Basically, as a teen, I was reading as a social scientist. I wasn’t interested allegory, symbolism, and the things that most people celebrate when they discuss the joys of reading. I’m not interested in dreaming with open eyes. Rather, when I read fiction, I am searching for nonfiction in those texts. In other words, I disagree with Neil Gaiman’s statement that “reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do.” I disagree with Gaiman’s assertion that fiction has a special place in activating our imaginations. While, I agree that fiction can be a gateway drug to reading, it doesn’t mean that nonfiction can’t inspire us.

We all read for different reasons, and we all read for different things. Today, I don’t read a lot of fiction. The last novel I read for fun was A Game of Thrones, and I believe prior to that might have been Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly and before that Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down (over a span of 5-6 years). There might be some Dan Brown in there also. However, I enjoy reading nonfiction more than fiction. I know I enjoyed SuperFreakonomics more than any other recently read fiction. 

In conclusion, I don’t think people read enough. As an educator, I believe reading books is important. However, I don’t believe in the idealized myth of what reading is supposed to be like – reading a physical paperback novel and daydreaming. Reading nonfiction on an e-ink Kindle is still reading. It might be a different experience, but it can still inspire and provoke deep thought.

My reading list this summer consists of:

  1. Finishing my friend Jeff Howison’s book on Reagan.
  2. Bourdieu’s Distinction
  3. Robert Sampson’s Great American City

Happy Reading Everyone

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They are not the same: MLA versus APA (or ASA)

Splatter Checksheet

checksheetIn my last post, I talked a bit about social science writing. Although I am trained as a sociologist, my work is interdisciplinary. My work draws on art history, cultural studies, geography, history, and media studies. As such, I often have to adjust my writing and reference style for different journals. In some cases, I’ve actually chosen not to submit my work to journals because it would require a massive revision of my work to change it from a social science style (APA, ASA, etc.) to MLA. This is one of the reasons why I cringe when someone says that all citation styles are the same. I think this is because most faculty simply refer to students to style guides that show the differences between MLA, APA and Chicago, but do not explain why the styles are different.

In this post, I want to highlight the key differences between MLA and social science references and try to explain why they’re different. First, of all I don’t want get into the difference between nomothetic social sciences and idiographic humanities. I’m more interested in the actual technical difference of citation and the function they serve. My goal is to use examples to show readers that there’s a reason the styles are different.

I’ve chosen an article from PMLA, the Modern Language Association’s flagship journal. Also, I’ve chosen American Sociological Review (ASR) an American Sociological Association (ASA) journal (because I’m a sociologist). Both touch upon similar topics: prisons, incarceration and its consequences. However, the goals are different. In PMLA, Robert Waxler is telling a story about his program Changing Lives through Literature. In this piece, he discusses his experiences with teaching literature to criminal offenders, and discusses Nathaniel Hawthorne’s description of prisons. In ASR, Matthew Desmond and Nichol Valdez are discussing the rise of third-party policing in poor neighborhoods using empirical evidence.

MLA is a style that is very closely associated with the type of textual analysis found in the humanities. The way one references text in that style, is very much tied to the practices and goals of the fields that use it.  Waxler writes in the 2nd paragraph of his article:

Nathaniel Hawthorne had another idea. He offers three terms – community, cemetery, and prison: “The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earlier practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison” (47). We cannot escape the cemetery anymore than we can escape necessity, as Hawthorne well knew. It marks the boundary for us, the radical limitation, the body without voice or movement, the corpse. The prison reminds us of a difference, the possibility of return to the community, to the voice and movement of lives restored-the call to freedom, to possibility.

Here it’s very clear that Waxler is writing about Hawthorne. Moreover, his use of Hawthorne is to help him define Waxler’s own understanding of mortal, physical and social boundaries. When he references William Wordsworth in the following paragraph, it’s very clear that he is now talking about Wordsworth. In addition to naming names, it’s also far less common in work that uses MLA to pack in references. References such as: (Ayling, Grabosky, and Shearing 2009; Braithwaite 2000) found in Desmond and Valdez’s article are not commonly used in this type of writing.

Here is the introductory paragraph from an article by Matthew Desmond and Nichol Valdez:

The United States has witnessed a prison boom of colossal proportions, fueled in large part by intensive policing of inner-city neighborhoods (Western 2006). At the same time cities were hiring more police officers and states were building more prisons, another far-reaching development was unfolding within the field of criminal justice. Across the Anglophone world, crime control was becoming decentralized and diffused throughout the social space. The police began convincing and coercing community actors (landlords, business owners) to assume some responsibility for correcting misconduct. Identified by a number of designations—here, we use the term third-party policing—this approach constituted “a new crime control establishment” (Garland 2001:17). “The most significant development in the crime control field,” according to Garland (2001:170), “[is the development of] a third ‘governmental’ sector . . . poised between the state and civil society, connecting the criminal justice agencies with the activities of citizens, communities and corporations . . . [and extending] the field of ‘formal’ crime control and its potential for organized action.”

While both articles define the concepts they will be using via quotes and references, the style and function of the references are different. In the sociology journal, Western’s name and publication year is the reference.  Typically, in the text of an MLA paper, Bruce Western would already be referenced to show who came up with the idea. This means the reference in MLA is telling the reader where it came from. In ASR, the reference quickly tells us who and when the idea of the prison boom came from. The where, or the textual is absent unless one chooses to look it up. Even then, the writing suggests that we are not particularly interested in Bruce Western either. Rather, the goal is to quickly give attribution to Western’s research on the prison boom to set up factual information before moving on to David Garland’s discussion of control to explain third-party policing. In short, the references obviously provide the reader with different information. This means readers from different backgrounds expect different information.

I want to go a bit further and illustrate how different the first sentence would be if re-written as MLA.

According to David Western in “Punishment and Inequality in America,” the United States has witnessed a prison boom of colossal proportions, fueled in large part by intensive policing of inner-city neighborhoods.

This MLA version makes the prison boom as an offshoot of David Western’s work. However, what is Western’s work? Is it opinion or is research? Even if one where change the sentence to “According to research conducted by criminologist David Western…,” it still implies a degree of subjectivity because it emphasizes the author. Sometimes this is useful, but in many cases it is not. In the social and natural sciences, the reference and writing style emphasizes the research behind the statement (or at least that it is credible and reliable). On some level, it does not matter who came up with the idea, because another researcher should be able to replicate the result.

This barely scratches the surface of the differences between two very excellent pieces of writing. However, I hope this begins a discussion of why styles are different. Or at least move away from statements like “MLA and APA are pretty much the same thing.”

Before I conclude, I want to mention another thing. If Waxler had been a sociologist, his article could be considered unethical. Prisoners are classified as vulnerable subjects. The inclusion of quotes from those he worked with for in a publication without informed consent and human subject approval could mean trouble for him. There is no discussion of this in the paper at all, whereas in a social science article there would be a mention of this. This means that the process and final result of writing for the humanities and social sciences are as different as their reference styles.

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Disciplinary Writing

I’m writing this as a rebuttal to my colleague Amanda’s blog post about writing. I fully understand the intent of her piece and appreciate the message she is trying to send to young writers. However, the idea that students should write from their soul troubles me greatly as a social science professor. The danger of telling young writers to come up with their own voice, is that they often interpret it as opinion or personal reflection in their papers. This is perhaps the greatest source of annoyance for social science faculty (and likely for those in the natural sciences as well). As someone who grades nearly 100 sociology papers a term, I am increasingly bothered by my students’ inability to write social science papers. They resort to MLA, because that’s how they’ve been taught for years. They extensively use metaphors and similes, because that’s how they learned to “show, not tell.” There are a number seniors who tell me that they’ve never written a research paper until they reached my class. Basically, my sociology colleagues and I need to (re)train our students in social science writing.

This does not just affect undergraduate students. Because high school writing and college composition is so heavily dominated by English departments, even graduate students often struggle to adapt to the norms and conventions of non-humanities fields. While Amanda is encouraging students to break the rules, I am arguing the opposite. Students need to learn the “rules” if they want to be taken seriously as social scientists. Duke University, for instance, has a guide to discipline-specific writing guide. Other discipline-specific writing resources can be found at the bottom of this post. I would argue that discipline-specific writing needs to be better integrated into K-12 and college curricula.

In most cases, writing is not simply about the author expressing their creativity. It is also about the audience. It is about communicating your ideas effectively to that audience. Different audiences expect different things. This is because different types of writing serve different purposes. The goal of creative writing is different than social science research writing. There are also different kinds of social science writing. Are you generating theory? Or reporting findings? Or is it a review of the literature? This all requires fundamentally different rhetorical strategies, and discipline (or even sub-discipline) specific writing. The strategy of “show, not tell,” is accomplished very differently in different fields. In order to effectively communicate ideas, the author must (reasonably) conform to the norms of the discipline.

Amanda emphasizes two things in her blog: voice and style.

I believe that ALL authors need to have a voice. However, different types of writing require different voices and styles. For example, ethnographers walk a tightrope where they need to ensure their voice does not overly impose their own subjectivity onto their “subjects” while still making their own argument. In some (not all) experimental and quantitative work, the author is often “reporting” results. It’s a matter-of-fact style in which procedure and results are front and center, not necessarily the author’s voice. Typically, the method chosen reflects the different goals and interests of the researcher, and in turn shape the writing. In fact, I would argue that voice, structure and style is very much tied to research method. The type of writing associated with different research methods has largely evolved out of the rhetorical needs of researchers to effectively make arguments, legitimize their work, establish credibility and make reliable claims. To deviate from convention is not just a risk, but poor social science writing. In some cases, it might even be considered unethical.

In conclusion, I want to offer different advice. It is actually a bit of advice that’s cobbled together from several professors I had in graduate school: Study the “type” of work published where you want to publish. Study the style and language of what you enjoy reading. In other words, learn to write like the authors you read. This does not mean give up on creativity. It means using successful examples of writing as a model for your own success.

Discipline Specific Writing Resources: