Sociology is a broad field with many approaches on every single level from which society can be viewed. From studies of the individual, to global trends, the field has opportunities for people with vastly different goals. Whether you want to study the family unit, or the global effects of a government’s foreign policy, sociology provides the tools with which to accomplish that goal.
This list of blogs features a diverse range of sociology blogs from scholars, researchers, and practitioners. These blogs can be of interest to sociology students and professionals for any number of reasons. Whether you are looking for somebody in the sociology field to have conversations with, or just looking for some stories or perspective on various problems, these blogs are a great place to start.
General Commentary on Society and Culture
1. Every Day Sociology Blog deals with the pressing sociological issues faced by our culture. The blog addresses rising cultural issues such as violence, education, privacy, and marriage equality through the lens of sociology.
Highlight: Thinking Sociologically about Education
2. Montclair SocioBlog consists of posts on sociology in general, addressing pertinent questions about society and culture. The blog is run by some members of the Montclair State Sociology Department, but has no official affiliation with the university.
Highlight: Wanted–Bad Research
3. The Global Sociology Blog is a blog concerned with sociology on an international scale. Global Sociology features many videos, graphs, and charts intended to communicate the numbers behind the sociological situation of the world.
Highlight: The Visual du Jour–Mexican Drug Cartels
4. This Sociological Life is the blog of sociologist Deborah Lupton. She examines current cultural issues from a sociological standpoint, often using cutting edge sociological theory to get to the bottom of things.
Highlight: The Quantified Self Movement: Some Sociological Perspectives
5. UnderstandingSociety seeks to understand the global place of the individual through examining social agency and structure in innovative ways. The blog examines everything from groups marginalized by society to the gradual change of social institutions and what drives that change.
Highlight: Moral Intuitions as Evolutionary Modules
6. Orgtheory addresses innovations in sociological theory and seeks to find applications for those innovations. The site also posts about new books in the field with the goal of beginning a discussion about the book’s implications.
Highlight: More Tweets More Votes: Social Media as a Quantitative Indicator of Political Behavior
7. Citings and Sightings keeps a close eye on sociology journals, and media to bring its readers the most up to date and cutting edge sociological perspectives on important, relevant topics.
Highlight: The Dirty World of Sanitation Work
8. Institutional Review Blog is aimed primarily at sociology academics and the content is geared toward commenting on news having to do with review board oversight. The blog also covers various other issues in academia including musings on funding and research faculty, and many of the other challenges faced by academic leaders in the field.
Highlight: What Can One University Do?
Political and Intellectual Viewpoints in Sociology
9. Sociological Images combines powerful imagery with clear and concise explanations of sociological phenomena. The blog’s viewpoint is largely political, but the author does also address other issues of interest within sociology.
Highlight: Punk in Burma: Cultural Appropriation & Resistance
10. A Very Public Sociologist is a political sociology blog focused on analyzing and critiquing various political movements and programs. The blog is run by a British sociologist and the bulk of the focus is on the U.K., but many of his thoughts can be applied outside those borders.
Highlight: Stoke’s Homes for a Quid
11. David Brake’s Blog is another U.K. blog. The blog’s focus is divided between social policy commentary on useful websites, resources and talks about the sociological aspects of various social technologies.
Highlight: Visualising How Much is Not Online
12. Sociology and Complexity Blog is heavily focused on the science side of sociology. The blog takes a hard look at scientific research both in sociology proper and in related sciences, such as economics.
Highlight: Complex Systems are Not Networks; They are Cases
13. Rural Sociology Group Wageningen is the blog of an European group based out of the Netherlands that studies rural social communities in Europe. The blog features content on the various distinctive qualities of rural life.
Highlight: Thesis: The Vegetable Network
14. Family Inequality features the musings of sociologist Philip N. Cohen on the sociological implications of current cultural trends and development on the family. Particular attention is paid to families that exist in a disadvantaged or marginalized state.
Highlight: Gender and Family Time: Change and Stall Visualized
15. Socializing Finance takes a sociological look at the finance industry and tries to find ways to apply sociological principles to finance that will improve the industry as a positive force in society.
Highlight: Donald Mackenzie on Financial Algorithms and Other Matters
16. Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog is a heavily scientific blog that melds the science of sociology with anthropology in order to study the effect of certain scientific phenomena on historical cultural evolution.
Highlight: Polynesian mtDNA in Extinct Amerindians from Brazil
17. Kieran Healy is an associate professor of Sociology whose research has been primarily in the exchange of various goods, from human blood, to software and the relationship between the moral order of market society and the effect of quantification on social classification.
Highlight: U.S. News’s Small N Problem
18. Permutations is concerned with the mathematics side of sociology. While the human factor seems to take center stage in the field, the mathematics supporting research are equally important when seeking to reveal hard truths and back up theories with evidence.
Highlight: Forecasting Poorly
19. Social Watch is a sociology watchdog blog that calls attention to pressing sociological issues around the world including human rights abuses, gender based discrimination, and poverty.
Highlight: Malaysia: The Longest Year
20. Executed Today can be a difficult blog to read. The blog examines historical executions and the sociological issues and circumstances that lead people to commit their crimes. The point is to remember that the human condition spans history and that while we have become much more adept at describing that condition in scientific terms, we have a long way to go before we start finding solutions to the problems.
Highlight: 1900: Bill Brown, Sonnie Crain and John Watson
21. Voices of Reason is a collaborative intellectual community that desires to bring together the minds of people from all intellectual backgrounds to discuss and debate issues, policies, and ideas in a non-partisan setting.
Highlight: Transitioning to Reason in Action
22. John Hawks Weblog features posts on paleoanthropology, genetics, and evolution. The content tends toward the scientific and has some cross application potential in the world of sociology.
Highlight: Civic Allometry
23. Somatosphere is a collaborative website positioned at the intersection of science, medicine, and anthropology. The blog also dabbles in cultural psychiatry, psychology, and bioethics.
Highlight: The Afflictions Series: An Interview with Ethnographic Filmmaker Robert Lemelson
24. Zero Anthropology is, despite its misleading name, all about anthropology. The blog deals specifically with post imperialism anthropology and is attached to the greater Zero Anthropology Project.
Highlight: Africa, Liberal Humanitarianism, and NATO’s Anthropology
25. Neuroanthropology focuses on the development of the human brain in its associated cultural structure. The blog features articles that approach the subject from a variety of perspectives and contexts.
Highlight: Neurocriminology, Meet Human Development
Lives and Musings of Sociologists
26. A Backstage Sociologist partly features in depth analysis of sociological issues, and topics within the realm of sociology academia, and this sociologist’s personal thoughts and experiences with life.
Highlight: The Road to Academic Perdition–MOOCs
27. Uncommon Thought Journal features the musings of its author on a wide variety of sociological issues. The blog deals with larger global issues, smaller local issues, and everything in between.
Highlight: Lil Wayne’s Lyrical Fascism
28. Apophenia is a blog from the other side of the sociology/social networking conversation. Danah Boyd is a senior communications researcher for Microsoft, which means it’s her job to analyze the social networks from a business side. She has extensive education in the studies of media, culture, and communication and will be an valuable resource for sociologists concerned with the sociological implications of technology.
Highlight: Addressing Human Trafficking: Guidelines for Technological Interventions
29. Scatterplot is an academically oriented blog that features the musings of its contributors, all sociology academics from a diverse array of universities.
Highlight: Conflicts
30. Office Hours features conversations with top social scientists from across multiple disciplines about the sociological implications of current events and their research.
Highlight: Mary Joyce on Digital Activism
