SOCIATION TODAY
THE BULLETIN

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Register for the 2003 Annual Meeting.
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DIRECTIONS TO BROYHILL INN & CONFERENCE CENTER

•From 421N into Boone: Drive into downtown Boone. Turn left at Depot Street and go through 1 traffic light, where the name changes to Bodenheimer Drive. Proceed up the hill ¾ mile to the Broyhill Inn & Conference Center.

•From Hwy 321N intoBoone: At the 8th traffic light (just past Hardee’s), turn left onto Rivers Street. At 5th traffic light, turn left onto Bodenheimer Drive and proceed ¾ mile up the hill to the Broyhill Inn & Conference Center.

•From Highway 105N into Boone: Turn left at Wendy’s Restaurant onto Blowing Rock Road. At 2nd traffic light (just past Hardee’s), turn left onto Rivers Street. At 5th traffic light, turn left again onto Bodenheimer Drive and drive ¾ mile up the hill to the Broyhill Inn & Conference Center.

Directions to reception from Broyhill Inn:
Go back down Bodenhemier Road. Go through the traffic light, where the street name changes to Depot Street. At next light turn left onto King St. Stay on King street for approximately 1/2 mile. Turn right onto Pinnacle Drive (you will see a Paint Store on the right before your turn). Drive straight up the road and keep driving all the way to the very top (the road eventually turns to a gravel road). The address is 1200 Pinnacle Drive.

Newsletter Receives New Name

For years it was SOCIATION. Then it became SOCIATION TODAY. If the membership of the NCSA approves the proposal for a new electronic journal, their newsletter will undergo yet another name change. Since the copyrighted name SOCIATION TODAY will be used by the electronic journal, the newsletter will be known simply as THE BULLETIN of the NCSA.

Changing the name won’t change the content, format or publication schedule, said longtime editor Lee Dodson. Members will continue to find electronic issues of THE BULLETIN on line and will receive an annual paper copy with ballots and registration materials for the annual meeting.

 2003 Annual Meeting in Boone Will Tackle Issues of Stratification:
"Still Stratified After All These Years"

by Beth Davision
NCSA President-Elect

I hope you are finalizing your plans to attend the NCSA annual meeting on February 20-21, 2003. This year’s meeting will held be at the Broyhill Inn and Conference Center (www.broyhillinn.com) in Boone, North Carolina. This recently renovated facility will allow out-of-town guests a one stop destination for both the meeting and hotel accommodations. Hotel rooms at the Broyhill Inn have been discounted for our meeting. Rooms are available at $76 (plus tax) which is one of the best deals in the high country during ski season. Make sure you specify that you are with the NCSA meeting when you call to make a reservation. There are still a couple of NCSA sponsored rooms available for students. Please contact me if you would like to reserve a room for your students.

The Annual Meeting will begin with the reception on Thursday, February 20th from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm at the home of Dr. Lorin Baumhover (Chair of the Sociology & Social Work Department at Appalachian State University). In addition to the traditional hors d’oeuvres and musical entertainment, you will be able to see the spectacular lights of Boone from his lovely home on top of Rich mountain. Directions from the Broyhill Inn to the reception are included in this newsletter, but I recommend that you take advantage of the shuttle service that will drive you up the steep mountain road to the reception.

As this year’s program coordinator, I decided to focus on an old sociological standard, stratification. I am drawn to this topic because it is a fundamental principle of our discipline and because it lies at the core of most of our social problems. During the meeting we will explore the many faces of stratification in North Carolina in various contexts including its manifestations in the classroom, research environment and applied settings. Panelists will share their experiences as they discuss the many processes, complexities and consequences of stratification in these varied environments. As always, the NCSA annual meeting will be a great place to learn from and share with our colleagues our understanding and experiences of sociology and its many manifestations across the state.

Because of the breadth of these issues, the program has been expanded to offer more choices of sessions and to accommodate the various interests of our faculty, students and applied sociologists. There will be three concurrent panels during both the morning sessions which include a total of 21 presenters from 14 different institutions across the state. A synopsis of the sessions are as follows:

Presenters Judith Blau (UNC), Caroline Whitehead (Craven Community College) and Angela Hattery (Wake Forest) will share their experiences in enhancing student education through service learning programs. Service learning is becoming more and more important in education as a means of placing students "where the action is." Some programs, such as the new Social and Economic Justice undergraduate minor at UNC, includes service learning as an integral and mandatory part of the curriculum. Explore with these academics the utility of having students learn about social issues and agency responses through service work in the "real world."

NC Digital Divide

Christa Reiser (ECU) and Ken Wilson (Director of the Survey Research Laboratory - ECU) will share their ongoing research into the diffusion of computer and internet resources across North Carolina. Findings from their research project have identified a new dimension of the "digital divide" by revealing the discrepancies between rural and urban Internet access. They will share their efforts and experiences in both documenting the problem and working collectively with community leaders to narrow the gap between our rural and urban communities.

Crossing Borders: Studying Stratification

This panel is composed of scholars who are engaged in various research initiatives that involve marganilized populations. Panelists will discuss the challenges and rewards of their research projects. Members of the panel include Jammie Price (UNCW), Teresa Scheid (UNCC), Leslie Hossfeld (UNCP), Jessica Hulick (UNCG) and Giselle Santiago (UNCC).

Rebecca Bach (Duke) will address an overlooked stratified environment where many of us congregate on a regular basis, the classroom. She and fellow panelists, Benjamin Albers (Duke), William Tyson (Duke) and Suzanne Strulowitz (Fayetteville), will discuss the hierarchal positions that students bring into the classrooms and how these varied statuses influence the learning process.

Career Paths in Sociology

This program is oriented to our undergraduate sociology majors. Sharon Jenson (Appalachian) and Jan Rienerth (Appalachian) will provide an encore presentation of their popular and practical program "how to put a sociology degree to work." They will discuss how to prepare a resume, survey the jobs available to sociology majors and overview the job seeking process. This year, to show the process works, Ed Rosenberg (Appalachian) will join them to discuss his work experiences as an applied sociologist putting his knowledge and skills to the test in the "real world."

Faculty Mentoring

As with our undergraduates, we also have a program for our graduate students and those faculty who work with them. Barbara Risman (NCSU), Maxine Atkinson (NCSU) and Angela Jones (Elon) will discuss their experiences with the Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) program. This innovative program helps to orient graduate students to their future roles as academic sociologists engaged in the teaching and research endeavors of higher education. Graduate students are paired with faculty mentors to help them learn to become a scholar, teacher and an active contributor to human progress.

WORKSHOP: How to Start A Student Research Center

The afternoon session will be devoted to a workshop on how to start a student-based research center. The leader of this workshop is Dr. Tom Plaut , Director of the Center for Assessment and Research Alliances (CARA), associated with Mars Hill College. CARA was established in 1995 and has actively engaged students and faculty in assessment and program evaluation projects for agencies and organizations in western North Carolina and across the state.

During the conference, don’t forget to visit our exhibitors. These include book vendors and representatives from the sociology graduate programs across the state. And, after the morning session plan to attend the awards luncheon and business meeting at the Broyhill Inn and Conference Center. The price for the lunch is $15, and will include entrees suitable for persons of all dietary persuasions.

Directions and program information can be found at www.soc.appstate.edu/NCSA . The web site includes links to Boone tourist destinations and weather links for those that might be apprehensive about the winter weather in the High Country. In the case of adverse weather conditions close to the meeting date, I will post weather updates to the website, but be assured that the main roads in and out of Boone are always kept clear, the university never closes and the streets are always lined with salt and slag (as attested by my rusting Subaru).

I’m looking forward to having you join us here in the mountains. Please don’t hesitate to call me at (828)262-6397 or email me at davisonb @appstate.edu if you have any questions or comments about the meeting.

Business Meeting Will Include Vote on Electronic Journal, Constitutional Changes

by Robert Wortham, NCSA Past-President
North Carolina Central University

Two important business items will be addressed at this year’s business meeting. The first item concerns a vote on the sponsoring of an electronic journal. The journal will be called Sociation Today: The Official Journal of the North Carolina Sociological Association. Should the membership approve sponsorship, the title of the association’s newsletter would be changed to The Bulletin.

The electronic journal will serve as a refereed journal of sociological information enabling scholars and the general public to gain greater access to important sociological findings in an understandable, user-friendly format. The journal will be devoted to short articles, journal article reviews, book reviews, applied studies that could be used as teaching aids and editorials or commentaries on important social issues that may prompt discussion among sociologists, the general public, government officials and planners. Should the NCSA membership vote to sponsor an electronic journal, the Web Journal Committee and the Executive Council will recommend that George Conklin (NCCU) serve as the editor and that the current members of the Web Journal Committee serve as the Editorial Board. Additional information concerning the journal is contained in the November 2002 issue of Sociation Today.

The second business item involves constitutional changes. If the NCSA membership votes to sponsor the electronic journal, two constitutional changes will need to be approved. The relevant articles and sections and the proposed changes are stated below:

Article IV. Section 1.

The officers of the Association shall be the President, President-Elect, Past-President, Secretary-Treasurer, and Editor.

Proposed Change:

The officers of the Association shall be the President, President-Elect, Past-President, Secretary-Treasurer, and Editor(s).

Article IV. Section 6.

The Editor shall be appointed by the President with the consent of the Executive Council for an indeterminate term. The Editor will be responsible to the Publications Committee and publish a newsletter and such other periodicals as the Association may wish to authorize.

Proposed Change:

The President with the consent of the Executive Council shall appoint the Editor(s) for an indeterminate term. The Editor(s) will be responsible to the Publications Committee and publish a newsletter, an electronic journal and such other periodicals as the Association may wish to authorize.

Return to NCSA Home Page.

Contact Information:

The editor of SOCIATION TODAY is Lee Dodson, Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Rockingham Community College, P.O. Box 38, Wentworth, NC 27375-0038
336-342-4261, ext. 2155

dodsonl@rockinghamcc.edu

  The secretary/treasurer of the NCSA is Sue Pauley, Professor of Sociology at Wingate University, Campus Box 5007, Wingate, NC 28174. Questions about membership shoud be directed to Dr. Pauly.

supaul@wingate.edu

Here Are This Year’s Candidates for NCSA Office

This year the Nominating Committee has found three candidates for positions on the NCSA Executive Council and one candidate willing to stand for office as president-elect. NCSA members are invited to write in candidates for these offices should they so desire.

Cathy Zimmer is the candidate for president-elect. The nominees for the three openings on the NCSA Executive Council are Cheryl Brown, Leslie Hossfeld, and Ida Simpson.

"We appreciate the willingness of these candidates to volunteer their time and talents to support the NCSA," said NCSA President Rick Dixon on behalf of the Nominating Committee. "If others would be willing to serve, now or in the future, we encourage them to make themselves known."

Candidate for President-Elect

The president-elect of the NCSA will serve as the program chair for next year’s annual meeting. Following a year as president, this person will serve for one year as a member of the Executive Council.

Catherine Zimmer

Catherine Zimmer is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Departments of Sociology and Socil Medicine at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. She has previously served for more than fourteen years on the faculty of North Carolina State University. Zimmer received his Master’s and Ph.D. from the Sociology Department at UNC and spent many of those years crunching numbers at the IRSS. Although the IRSS has been renamed the Odum Institute, Zimmer is once again working as a statistical analyst there. She meets one-on-one with faculty and students from across the campus who are involved in social research. In addition, she teaches short courses on strucural equation modeling, logistic regression, STATA and SPSS. Her research interests include quantitative methods, organizational sociology, and the sociology of work.

"The NCSA has been an important organization for me since 1986 when I presented my first paper at the annual meeting in Greensboro," says Zimmer. "I enjoy attending the annual meetings and serving on the NCSA Executive Council from 1997-2000. I particularly appreciate the NCSA’s emphasis on undergraduate education. By serving as President, I hope to enhance the visibility and applicability of sociology in North Carolina."

The membership will elect three of the following candidates to serve three-year terms on the NCSA Executive Council. Please use the enclosed ballot. You may write in candidates if you wish.

Cheryl Brown

Cheryl Brown, Associate Professor of Sociology, joined the faculty of Greensboro College in 2001. As an applied sociologist, her work has focused on service to victims of family violence and sexual assault, evaluating projects for non-profits such as the National Conference for Community and Justice and the Children’s Museum, and issues affecting gay and lesbian members of our society. In Colorado, Cheryl served as the Chair of the Sociology section of the Faculty-to-Faculty Group under the Colorado Commission on Higher Education and as co-organizer for two state sociology summits.

Leslie Hossfeld

Leslie Hossfeld is Assistant Professor of Sociology at UNC-Pembroke. With research interests focusing on North Carolina workers, she is currently working on two projects: mapping poverty in eastern North Carolina and interviewing displaced workers in Robeson County. She is an active member of SSS, ASA, SSSP, and NCSA. Hossfeld recently co-founded and serves as Chair for the Southeastern North Carolina regional chapter of Sociologists for Women in Society.

Ida Harper Simpson

Ida Harper Simpson is Professor of Sociology at Duke University. She is the former President of the Southern Sociological Society, editor of Contemporary Sociology, and a recipient of the NCSA Contributions to Sociology award. Her major teaching and research interests are in the areas of work and the family. She is currently studying operating farms that have been in the same family for more than a century.

Official ballots are only included in the mailed copies of SOCIATION TODAY.