My little department is at a point of inflection. We have seen many retirements in the last few years and a couple of new hires — myself included! We also decided to turn our criminal justice concentration into an entire major and change our department name. We are now the Department of Sociology & Criminal…
Author: Rebecca Stone
New report: “A Pilot Workshop for Developing Early Career Scientists’ Communication Skills”
[I’m about to emulate those recipe blogs I hate by giving you an entire personal backstory before finally giving the details of the report. If you want to skip that — and I don’t blame you — you can find the report right here.] ser – end – dip – i – ty noun…
Just a thin excuse for eating a whole lotta chocolate: M&M sampling exercise
This year I finally got around to doing something I’ve wanted to do for a long time: a sampling demonstration with candy! It went really well, so I figured I’d write it up in case anyone else needs a bit of motivation. First, I want to recognize the two “pushes” that finally encouraged me to…
A Summer Syllabus
I admit it: I am not very organized. I am definitely a planner, but these plans usually exist in my head, on my Google calendar, or on various Post-Its scattered across at least three different working spaces in two cities. I have a lot of big ideas, but very rarely sit down and actually plot them…
Crime Mapping
Like many (most?) PhDs, I did not receive any formal training in teaching during my graduate studies. The teaching preparation in my program, at the time, was pretty much trial-by-teaching. Once we had completed our non-dissertation coursework, we could teach a course as a graduate instructor. We were paired with a supervising professor, given a…
A Second and Still Incomplete List of Criminal Justice Podcasts
It has been a little bit more than a year since I published A Most Definitely Incomplete List of Podcasts for Criminal Justice Classes, and since then podcasts have only become more popular – especially podcasts about crime. Science communication experts are constantly pressing the importance of story or narrative for conveying information, and that…
Narrative identity and neuroscience
Lately I have been thinking a lot about the “interactive” part of narratives of desistance – the negotiation of narratives with others, positive feedback and “identity verification” , and the role of the story audience in determining which narratives are credible and authentic and which are not. I think that this is a point of…
The risky business of reentry and desistance
“The day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” — Attributed to Anaïs Nin, possibly Elizabeth Appell. During my years in graduate school, I became heavily involved in dog training and competition. It was a welcome distraction from the stress of graduate…
Role identities, narrative identity, and change
In the question period of an ASC panel about identity change and desistance, an audience member commented that in looking at this relationship, we should remember that we all change our identities. She rattled off a few examples of her own identity changes, largely focusing on role identities and also on a transition from rebellious…
A Most Definitely Incomplete List of Podcasts for Criminal Justice Classes
A recent discussion in the Facebook group “Teaching with a Sociological Lens” (which is a fantastic group that I highly recommend!) reminded me of how much I love to use podcast episodes in place of or alongside reading assignments when I teach criminal justice topics. Actually, podcasts are just one of many different things that…