Member Input Sought in Open Forums

All ASA members are invited to attend two open forums at this year’s Annual Meeting. Whether you are a long-time reader of ASA’s newsletter, Footnotes, or a new member in the process of receiving your first volume, your comments about newsletter content and format are invited. Members concerned with censorship issues and infringement of academic freedom and scientific integrity will want give feedback to the new ASA Task Force on Academic Freedom and Scientific Integrity.

What Do You Like, and Not Like, about ASA
FOOTNOTES? [Details]

ASA editorial staff will solicit structured and free-form input from readers of FOOTNOTES, ASA's print newsletter, about content and format. ASA is developing a new look for FOOTNOTES and seeks information on reader preferences and current reading habits relative to FOOTNOTES. Among several questions to be entertained will be: how can FOOTNOTES better serve members, what are the popular sections and features of FOOTNOTES presently, and how do readers use information learned from FOOTNOTES?

Academic Freedom and Scientific Integrity [Details]

The ASA Task Force on Academic Freedom and Scientific Integrity has been charged with developing information on the broad range of attacks, censorship, or other limitations on the scholarship of sociologists and departments of sociology, considering whether the ASA should establish an on-going clearinghouse of such incidents, and reviewing how such information could be used by the Association and the profession to protect academic freedom. This Open Forum will discuss issues of academic freedom and scientific integrity and inform sociologists of the breadth of the Task Force’s proposed activities and mixed methods for data gathering. The moderated dialogue will publicize these activities, raising awareness, engagement, and future response rates. The forum will be broadening, bringing the full membership into dialogue concerning the issues; the forum will be narrowing, orienting Association members to the important question of how to analyze what is occurring to sociology departments and individual sociologists. By inviting such dialogue now, the Task Force hopes to lay the groundwork for a productive conversation and, ultimately, a feasible and useful set of recommendations.

This workshop is part of the Research Support Forum at this year’s Annual Meeting. Members of the Task Force are Samuel Lucas (chair), University of California, Berkeley; Kathleen Blee (liaison to ASA Council), University of Pittsburgh; Melanie E. Bush, Adelphia University; Elaine Draper, California State University, Los Angeles; Neil Gross, Harvard University; Anna Romina Guevarra, Arizona State University West; and Paul Kamolnick, East Tennessee State University.