Sociological Images

With Gwen Sharp, I am the editor of the website Sociological Images.  The site is designed to encourage all kinds of people to exercise and develop their sociological imagination by presenting brief discussions of compelling and timely imagery that span the breadth of sociological inquiry.  The website receives 500,000 to 750,000 visits per month and is followed, additionally, by over 20,000 individuals subscribed by RSS feeds, over 17,000 via Facebook, over 7,000 on Twitter, and over 15,000 on Pinterest.

Sociological Images posts are frequently re-posted at Jezebel, Ms., Racialicious, and Love Isn’t Enough. We are used as a source by a wide range of news organizations, including the Baltimore Sun, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Weekly, the Boston Globe, the Dallas Observer, the Telegraph, American Prospect, American Spectator, CBS News, ABC News, TIME, the Guardian, Mother Jones, Bitch, the National Review, Nerve, the Atlantic, Psychology Today, Self, Marie Claire, Time Out New York, the Utne Reader, and The Onion; on websites such as BoingBoing, the Daily Kos, AdWeek, the Feminist Majority Foundation, Matthew Yglesias, Pharyngula, and Salon; and in podcasts by the American Spectator, Bitch, Racialicious, and Contexts.

While Sociological Images has a wide array of readers around the world, it was originally designed to be a teaching resource.  Today, instructors of all kinds draw on the site.  Accordingly, we have been reviewed favorably in Teaching Sociology and Visual Studies and have been nominated and/or granted several awards:

• The ASA Section on Communication and Information Technologies (awarded 2012)
• The University of Minnesota Sociology Department (awarded 2012)
• The Pacific Sociological Association (awarded 2009)
• The Pop Culture / American Culture Association (nominated 2010)
• The American Sociological Association (nominated 2010).

Please feel free to visit the blog and our Instructor’s Page to peruse our Pinterest board and our Course Guides (featuring posts arranged by course topics), borrow from our list of Sample Assignments, and use the short, accessible Sociological Images-Inspired Essays published in issues of ASA’s Contexts magazine.

The website is a member of a social science community of blogs at The Society Pages.  Read more about Sociological Images here.