Jesse Smith
@jessesmithsoc
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Incoming Assistant Professor with the Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at The Ohio State University | Sociologist of religion, family, and culture
Joined August 2022
See my latest critique of Christian nationalism (CN) lit in sociology. I draw a parallel between theories of CN and dispositional authoritarianism, showing how they make largely similar claims and so have the same problems. Long 🧵 1/
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RT @NRO: A few enclaves in a few institutions, while laudable, are not sufficient to combat intellectual homogeneity across the universitie….
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See my piece in @NRO today, in which I make a straightforward yet oft-resisted argument: Practically speaking, “viewpoint diversity” in higher ed should mean “a lot more conservatives.”
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Watch at 22:30 (though the whole thing is worthwhile). Interesting that the first question comes from Jon Rauch, whose thesis is that we have to trust experts because they’re the only legitimate knowledge game in town. 2/2.
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“Every single hot-button issue in the United States, I have seen professors and students either get in trouble with, lose their job, be suspended for. What does that mean for the public’s ability to trust experts on any hot-button issue? . They shouldn’t.”. Bold from Lukianoff.1/.
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Getting more researchers to post their data on Open Science Framework is a perfectly laudable practice but as a proposal to address higher ed’s crisis is kind of missing the point.
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Many (not all) reflections from academics on how to win back public trust feel a little like the Democratic Party’s discourse on how to win back alienated male voters. Focus on issues of presentation when what is needed is fundamental reorientation.
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And by way of shameless self-promotion, I have two critiques of the Christian nationalism literature, linked below. 8/8.
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Very glad to see these issues are gaining not only growing awareness but articulation. They are subtle, but we can recognize and combat them better if we can describe them. Find the non-paywalled version here: 7/
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Crucially, Rubin raises the point that we can't blame some subset of activist scholars for these problems. Journal editors and reviewers are letting these studies through, apparently thinking this is how things are supposed to work. Normativity has become a dominant logic. 6/.
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In my 2022 CN critique I called for stronger theorization and argued that correlational studies had passed the point of diminishing returns. Each of these problems has only gotten worse since. This makes sense if we recognize that explanation isn't the goal of the literature. 5/
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Those operating in a normativity framework don't consider alternative explanations for their results, as any intro methods book says you should, as they are only interested in one (reductionistic, moralistic) explanation. This problem abounds in CN lit. 4/
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Scholars link a social phenomenon to "bad" things, then declare that phenomenon is also "bad" or reduces to the other "bad" things, making no serious effort to explain the links. This strategy describes most of the CN lit, whose claims rest on endless survey correlations. 3/
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Rubin says jargon takes the place of explanation. Relabeling known phenomena so as to shift emphasis and add moral valence is passed off as theorizing. This applies to the term "Christian nationalism" itself, which doesn't describe anything we haven't known about for decades. 2/
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Hard-hitting article in T&S on how normativity has displaced theory in social science. Advocating for a particular, moralistic understanding of the social world rather than trying to explain that world. I've made similar points in my Christian nationalism lit critiques. 1/🧵.
New article from @ashleytrubin, in which she describes in detail the important difference between passionately held political opinions vs. actual social scientific theory-building. Click on the tweet below for a non-paywalled version of the article!.
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I love a good “pox on all their houses” post, especially when it also has a constructive element!
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Tracks pretty well with Helen Longino’s work. Perhaps ironically, feminist epistemologists have some of the strongest arguments for why academia needs more conservatives.
A great argument in favor of viewpoint diversity in academia in this chapter by Williams et al. Political polarization and the strengthening of ideology can undermine critical thinking in homogeneous groups (due to politically motivated reasoning, myside bias, motivated
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Bummer…ChatGPT hallucinated an article I really wanted to read. If anyone knows of actual sources making this argument, please advise!
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Though it does raise the question: What is the difference between a “statistical artifact or anomaly” and an actual finding, but one that only applies in select circumstances or to a small group? Hedging and clarification are in order, but “limited”≠“illusory.” 2/2.
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Interesting article. I question how many were actually under the impression that worship attendance makes people more liberal, but important to dig into the details methodological details regardless. 1/
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FWIW, this thought is inspired by the article below. Interesting and helpful study, but it directly implicates some work by other scholars (some cited, some not) and I’d like to hear their response. But the benefits of this practice would apply broadly.
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