A Guide to the Sociological Blogosphere

Browsing sociology blogs is a delicious combination of two of my favorite activities: productive procrastination and sitting. Below I’ve put together a little introduction to the blogs I follow in hopes that you’ll discover some new sites. If you know any others, let us know in the comments so we can give them shoutouts in the right sidebar.

• Angie Andriot, formerly known as Wicked Anomie, is one of my favorite writers. She’s funny, insightful, and I recommend browsing the Best of Wicked Anomie on the right sidebar of that site. Where else can you learn about The Science of Cherry Popping or How to Make a Blind Reviewer Voodoo Doll?
• There are a lot of bloggers who are high quality, but Jay Livingston at the Montclair SocioBlog is one of the few who combines that skill with high quantity as well. Check out his recent top-ten list from the past year of posts.
• scatterplot and orgtheory.net are distinguished sociological salons, as they’re both group blogs with thriving comment sections. The comments on posts in which they debate the contents of a theory syllabus or “ask a scatterbrain” are often as interesting as their topical posts. orgtheory also has a fantastic series of thirty-plus posts with tips for grad students that has been indispensable for me since I discovered it.
• No guide would be complete without The Global Sociology Blog, which is among the most prolific and provocative blogs out there. This blog is generalist in scope, but consistently delivers interesting posts relating to contemporary social issues.
• If you want snark and thorough verbal takedowns, check out Total Drek and The Power Elite. The former deals mostly with conservative religion and politics; the latter takes a critical criminological approach; and both, on multiple occasions, have made me utter “wow…” after reading their latest eviscerating critique.
• Calling Understanding Society a blog is almost a misnomer. It combines the thoroughness of a textbook, the scope of the social sciences, and a clear, incisive writing style to tackle pretty much everything. I really can’t rave about this site enough. Browse its thematic table of contents and you can get lost for hours.
• Contexts, the ASA’s magazine that reaches the public with sociological content, also has a group of blogs under its umbrella, hosted at The Society Pages. I especially recommend A Backstage Sociologist, Citings and Sightings (formerly contexts crawler), contexts discoveries, Sociological Images, and Teaching the Social World.
• There are several sociologists who have blogs and simply write whenever the mood strikes them. Jeff Weintraub at Penn and potlatch post quite frequently. Chris Uggen at Minnesota, not your typical sociologist, socviews, and Union Street can’t boast the quantity of posts of many of the above blogs, but their quality is just as good.
• Other blogs drill down into various subfields, such as family (Family Inequality), information (The Sociology of Information), race (Racism Review), and technology (danah boyd and Eszter Hargattai). Still others focus on methods, such as Complexity and Social Networks and Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
• Finally, don’t forget about those in our own department who have blogs. Vitalie Sprinceana in the Ph.D program recently started an English blog, Le Sociologue Nomade. (He also has a Romanian blog, if you’re up to the challenge of comprehending the hilariously horrible renderings of Google Translate.) My own paltry contribution, Potato Chipping, hosts my papers and an occasional post on youth, education, and/or technology.

[Edit: Jay from the Montclair Socioblog recommends two additional blogs: Code and Culture, which includes coding fixes/applications for statistical software, and Claude Fischer’s Made in America, a complement and extension of his recent book by the same title.]