Looking Forward to the 2009
Annual Meeting in San Francisco

Building Excellent, Diverse, and Just Communities: A Conversation Among Artists, Academics, and Activists

by Patricia Hill Collins, University of Maryland-College Park and ASA President

The 2009 Annual Meeting will be launched with an exciting opening plenary session, "Building Excellent, Diverse, and Just Communities: A Conversation Among Artists, Academics and Activists." The plenary features innovative thinkers from diverse backgrounds, fields, and stages of the life course who have placed their craft in service to issues of social justice. The panelists will share how their work gives them a distinctive viewpoint on the needs of contemporary and future communities. Through a conversation across different perspectives, my goal is to encourage an exchange that might catalyze new sociological thinking about the communities in which we are engaged as well as imagined communities that we might create. Because our panelists are not simply thinkers but also doers, this session should provide pragmatic ideas about what works, what doesn’t, and why.

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Randall Collins

Results of 2009
Election Are In

Randall Collins, University of Pennsylvania, has been elected to serve as the 102nd President of the American Sociological Association (ASA) for 2010-2011. David Snow of the University of California-Irvine has been elected Vice President-Elect. Collins and Snow will assume their respective offices in August of 2010, following a year of service as President-Elect and Vice President-Elect. Collins and the 2011 Program Committee are responsible for shaping the ASA Annual Meeting, which will be held August 13-16, 2011, in Chicago. As President, Collins will serve as Chair of the ASA Council, which governs the Association and its policies.

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ASA Partners with Sage
for Journal Publishing

by Karen Gray Edwards, ASA Director of Publications and Membership

After an exhaustive two-year process, the ASA has signed an agreement with Sage Publications to partner with the Association in publishing its journals. Sage will begin publishing the American Sociological Review, Contemporary Sociology, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Social Psychology Quarterly, and Teaching Sociology with the 2010 volume year. Until now, ASA has self-published these six journals. Sociological Methodology and Sociological Theory, currently published for the ASA by Wiley-Blackwell, will fold into the Sage partnership in 2012.

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David Bills to Edit
Sociology of Education

by James Rosenbaum, Northwestern University

David Bills

One of the great things about the ASA Section on Sociology of Education is the extent that so many of us identify with it. That is also one of the burdens. We expect a lot from the editor of the Sociology of Education journal. When we say we want administrative efficiency, what we really want is something much more subtle. We want efficient management—someone who will ruthlessly badger, cajole, and embarrass delinquent reviewers to expedite the reviewing process. We want somebody who is able to say "no" but do it nicely. We want someone who responds often enough to reviewers’ suggestions so that they will consent the next time they are tapped, but an editor can’t respond to all of reviewers’ concerns, or papers would never get published. If an editor has all of these qualities, they will get the job done, and that is no easy feat.

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Sociology in the Twittersphere

by Jackie Cooper, ASA Public Information Office

twitter It seems that everyone is a-twitter these days over the online social media darling Twitter (see www.twitter.com). According to a May 2009 report by marketing research company comScore, Twitter logged an estimated 32 million visitors worldwide in April, surpassing the number of monthly unique visitors to the website of The New York Times, among other popular sites. The evidence of Twitter’s growing popularity is potentially much stronger, however, since the comScore data does not account for those who "tweet" using mobile phones, desktop applications, or other websites.