Why does campus IT periodically (~every 5 years for the past three decades) demand that faculty websites be upgraded to new software that breaks the old site & requires many hours of labor before there is a functional new site? (In retrospect a reason to maintain one's site off campus servers.)

@madison.com Shame on you. First you published inflammatory charges about mishandling of confidential data by analyst for the independent monitor. You finally published a correction saying that no one had actually made such a charge. The correction does not appear in searches.

Free PDF download ends May 19. A story of how persistent ordinary activism and media outreach led to a huge Black protest event that in retrospect marked the transition from protests organized around the Civil Rights coalition to what later became the Black Lives Movement.

From now to May 19 the PDF of our new book The Jena 6: Of Nooses, Fights, Narratives, and Movement Building can be downloaded for free. We revisit the big 2007 mobilization in which tens of thousands of mostly young Black people protested in rural Louisiana.

One again cursing journal policies that include references in the word/page count limits. Punishing scholars for comprehensive research.

Again reflecting on how little respect qualitative researchers often seem to have for other people's qualitative empirical work. So many papers cite theory and complain about inadequacies of quantitative work but don't bother cite other relevant qualitative empirical work. "nobody has ever" frame.

Once again wondering why someone would put "do not cite or circulate" on a manuscript submitted to a public preprint server. Do they not know what a preprint server is and does? Do they not know what that sentence means?

Dealing with a grant application implemented as a Google form whose response boxes have differing character limits that are not listed on the form. Having to find the limits by pasting text into each box to see how much fits. And the deadline is not on the form (although is on the information page)

Urgent threat to NSF SBE funding. Take action: cossa.org/action-cente...

Did you know that we dealt with acid rain in the US for 6 YEARS longer than we had to? You can thank Citizens for Sensible Control of Acid Rain for that - an electric utility and coal industry corporate front group To honor Earth Day, I wrote about some anti-environment disinformation campaigns

If you submit papers please also review papers. If you feel you should be paid to review. I understand that. Then only submit to journals who pay reviewers. #AcademicChatter

To my CBSM friends, letting you know my feelings will not be hurt if I lose the election. I intend to vote for my opponent Andrea S. Boyles, whose work I know and respect although I have never met her. I think it is good for the section to be led by younger scholars. 1/2

Ugh. We've been keeping project notes in Google drive since 2014. Realizing who "owns" the folders and files is a mess and we have lost some files when people using their Uni Google accounts left the U. (This isn't the core data but is a lot of process documentation). Time to do backups and copies.

Since I retired I have rarely felt that hunted sense of doom from having more tasks that really needed to be done than time to do them. But today that's how I'm feeling. Drama in a volunteer org has just sucked up all the time and I'm hitting the wall. Breathe.

Data Center Watch sounds like a ragtag watchdog group, but it's a front group for 10a Labs "10a Labs has a financial incentive to create an atmosphere of fear – to make it seem like data centers are under constant threat from rabid activists that could cost them billions and billions of dollars."

Perverse incentive structure? Journal review instructions: Just a few lines to the editor to reject. Longer helpful comments needed if you recommend publication.

IMO an important academic value is that your personal identity is accountable for what you put into the public space. Thus pseudonyms inappropriate for academic work & your ORCiD should have enough public info to "out" you to others. (Posting my view in a discussion among preprint moderators.)

On trans visibility day I want to acknowledge the many trans people who are important in my life.

Excited to share my latest publication with @pamelaoliver.bsky.social ! 📢 Our timely paper shows how the relationship between news coverage and political institutions shape what we remember about protests against police violence. #AcademicSky

@eringaede.bsky.social and I have a new publication about NYT & Black newspaper coverage of late 1990s protests about police violence in New York. NYT emphasized partisan politics, police views; Black news emphasized ongoing struggle. Open access. Hope you'll check it out.

And don't forget about the ladder engagement. Ask for a low lift thing, then a medium lift and then the harder lift. Don't start with the hard lift first.

If you're engaged in organizing that needs more people to join, share those opportunities in every way you can. Invite people to join in. Keep making the invitations because most people don't join the first time you ask. For every 10 people you invite, you might get one person who will take it up.

A good article and important reminder that intense surveillance is happening in a lot of places, not just the ones that make the national headlines. Memphis.

Since the requests to discuss NoKings3 have started coming in, I'm posted this week's newsletter early. It asks if we're focusing on the wrong stuff and missing key opportunities to build solidarity and protect our communities and our democracy. Read why here: danarfisher.com/2026/03/20/a...

me writing: The details of my analysis are all really important. The journal word limits are way too low. I need all these words to explain things properly. me reading: This work makes an important argument but it is way too wordy. #AcademicSky

The suggestion that peer reviewers should check the authenticity of every citation is made by people who are not active peer reviewers. Someone has to check for fraud yes but peer reviewing several MSS per month already takes a long time & there are too few academics doing this volunteer labor.

After a series of sysadmin actions over the past few years, my once thriving uni-hosted website is nonfunctional. Trying to decide whether it is worth it at this career stage to get help reviving it on a different platform or just give up. I've had a website for 40+ years so not my first go-round.

It takes a certain kind of…narcissistic nihilism to look across the country at people self-organizing against something that is generally a fairly good material symbol of the intangible class warfare that has alienated them and say, “what a silly distraction from what *really* matters.” And yet…

Having to explain to an academic journal that it is difficult & misleading to require a single yes/no answer to a double-barreled question on a review form. Whether the writing is clear is not the same as whether the lit review is complete.

We have posted our AI policy An introduction: socopen.org/2026/03/09/s... And the policy: socopen.org/ai-policy/

🎵🧵This is a great question: what are the songs performed on SNL with longest duration between recording and performance? (Not including songs performed by an artist's previous bands, no so Paul Simon doing Simon & Garfunkel or Jagger doing Stones or McCartney doing Beatles or Wings.) 1/

I'm old enough to remember when SPSS etc were new and contained bugs and protocol involved listing your computing tools in pubs. In fact, good protocol still involves replicable identifiable tools. stat software can still have bugs but vibe coded is even worse.

It is way more fun to run tables and make figures and identify patterns in data than to slog through tightening up a paper and making a coherent argument so a journal will take it. The disadvantage of not worrying about getting tenure is that lack of panic reduces deadline sense.

Still dealing with the fallout of a madly dysfunctional meeting that includes wading through eight emails from an angry person who was on Zoom in hybrid format and mad at me because I was in charge of the webcam and they could hear me sighing heavily and took it personally.

🚨 Protest in the US is accelerating during Trump 2.0 (read the whole thread by @chenoweth.bsky.social for details) 👇

I'm the moderator who flagged the submission Philip is talking about here. The goal is a conversation about balance of "AI" and human work in papers. I think I may write a post about my own opinions, but we social scientists need to have a broader conversation about this. In particular, 1/2

My dissertation has tracked this effort over the past year, examining the critical yet often overlooked role of manufactured homes in providing affordable housing, particularly in rural areas. This bill has the potential to strengthen protections for more than 138,000 residents across Wisconsin.

MUST READ: The best synthesis I have seen so far of things I knew or had put together from various sources but had not really seen pulled together 🧪 Importantly, I don’t think these academics were an aberration. I think a lot of scientists would have entered these circles, given the option.

Earth to Trump: You Can't Cancel Climate Change. My newest post discusses the likely effects of Trump's decision to repeal the endangerment finding. "Ignoring the science and the will of the people sets us all up for the perfect storm." danarfisher.com/2026/02/13/e...

A powerful new piece from Nikole Hannah- Jones www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/m... I write about this legacy a bit as well in my book www.sup.org/books/sociol... All royalties go to: kyblack.org

Small wins I guess when the world is on fire. A sync problem got resolved with a password reset, even though the reset should theoretically not have been necessary.

About 10 years ago, I set out to better understand the drivers of radicalization and deradicalization into white supremacy. Work from our endeavors is starting to come out, and I am no longer concerned about sharing it. I want to share the findings from one of these studies, published last March. 🧵

Long but detailed thread first about violations of law and then inhumane treatment of immigrants. Ends with how you can support.

I've learned that my occasional posts on Facebook about "what is going on" including with ICE and resistance in Minnesota are getting noticed by people I know who are normally not very political or even moderately conservative, even though they don't "like" or comment on them. 1/2

Not sure yet but I now suspect what I thought was a phishing attempt may actually be a real bill generated by workday. WHY does the same institution send out fake phishing emails to try to make people aware and send real notices that look just like phish

Is it just me or have others had problems with publishers under-specifying the requirements for graphics and then having to re-do everything at the last minute when they get around to telling you what they are? I'm thinking fonts, font sizes, page sizes, DPI, etc. for graphs and maps. #AcademicSky

Thought-provoking new article from @iansociologo.bsky.social & Annabel Ispen on this admin's rollback of environmental & climate policies: "Redefining Discrimination: Dismantling Environmental Protections through the Logic of Reactionary Colorblindness." journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/....

A new genre of human-written human-tested third-party trustworthy (no kickbacks from vendors) product reviews I'm waiting for: what "AI integration" tools within a software product actually do. No, I don't want to use LLMs to write or how to instruct chatgpt etc

This applies in every discipline. Plenty of science conferences where everyone is sucking up to the Big Names and ignoring cool science and scientists from less prestigious institutions or countries. Be the person who welcomes everyone to your community, whatever it may be! #academicsky

This thread from a Sci Fi writer a lot more famous than I am offers important insights for academics (or I suppose people in any field) #AcademicSky