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This brief pedagogical essay, focusing on social science classrooms, provides fellow instructors with practical strategies and advice in reducing the presence of stereotype threat in their classrooms. Techniques of task reframing, practices of positive affirmation, the providing of constructive criticism, the incorporation of marginalized groups into course content, and suggestions for meeting stereotype threat head-on are discussed as are some strategies students can adopt themselves. While the methods of stereotype threat reduction addressed in this essay can help curtail some of the negative impacts of racism's micro-level forces, stereotype threat must also be considered a structural problem that requires structural solutions.

Recent research has called on scholars to develop pedagogical interventions to address issues of media literacy. This teaching note answers that call by describing a media literacy project designed for use in social problems classes. The project acquaints students to the constructionist approach to social problems and the method of content analysis. Guided by the principles of scaffolding, the note discusses how students are guided through a series of readings, assignments, and activities that enables them to analyze how social problems are portrayed in news media. Analysis of student papers and comments reveals an increased understanding of the rhetorical strategies that are commonplace in media coverage of social problems. While designed for social problems, the project can be adjusted and modified for use in other sociology courses.

This study documents the industrial conditions that permitted the green-lighting and production of The Walking Dead (2010–2022) on AMC, a network that built its reputation through high-brow series like Mad Men (2007–2015) and Breaking Bad (2008–2013). The findings challenge two major arguments forwarded to make sense of the show's airing: 1) the diagnostic model which suggests that zombies dovetailed into a zeitgeist-coloured paranoia of Others and the aftereffects of a neoliberalised social order and 2) the reputation model, which maintains that the industry track records of the personnel behind projects significantly enhances the chances of receiving a green-light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study shines light on the general factors involved in film cycle development and non-development through a focus on Dawn of the Dead's (Romero, 1978/79) influence in the Italian and US film markets. Four factors, commercial success, sociopolitical events and broader social currents, supporting cultural phenomena and ephemera, and industrial compatibility, are comparatively assessed with respect to the Italian zombie cycle from 1978 to 1981 and the lack of an American cycle from the same period. The comparative approach advanced in the article properly historicizes the development of zombie cinema after one of its landmark films. Moreover, while the approach is applied to late 1970s/early 1980s zombie cinema, it offers a general analytic for future film cycle scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, focusing primarily on the cinema of the walking corpse, I provide an overview of zombie studies and suggest potential avenues for sociological inquiry into zombie phenomena. I argue that zombie films, comic books, novels, video games, and the like can be seen as significant cultural objects that reflect and reveal the cultural and material circumstances of their creation. Despite emanating from complex culture-producing institutions and (arguably) capturing extant social anxieties, sociology has remained quiet on zombie phenomena. Issues of significance, history, and definition are discussed. I then locate three avenues of inquiry ideally suited to the sociological toolkit: symptomatic analysis of content, production, and audience response and interaction. I conclude by calling for a multipronged sociological analysis into 'zombie culture.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]