Dustin Kidd

As a newly tenured faculty member, I'm reflecting on what helped me the most in crossing this difficult bridge. Here's my top five. 1. Research: Do one big thing at a time. It's easy to feel like you need to achieve a million things: as many articles as possible, a book, book reviews, media interviews, conferences, edited volumes, research networks in your area. That can be a formula for actually accomplishing nothing. So pick one thing at a time to focus on. I struggled a lot with this, but at a key moment I put an article to the side and just focused on my book. So I suggest picking the most important thing to start with and going after that. If you're interest in writing a book, but struggling to get started, then write one article that can become a book chapter, and then write the book. If you're ready to go straight to the book, go for it. If you're really an article writer, write one at a time. A useful resource for me in the writing process has b...

Need a quick fact from the census? Try http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html . Helpful data on race, gender, education, and disability, among other things.

I'm re-designing my course on popular culture for this fall to make it a research-intensive class. That's not a technical designation at Temple, the way that writing-intensive is, but it is a helpful way for me to think about bringing students into the data collection process. Until now, the course was always writing-intensive, so I guided students through the process of producing a sociology paper, but with a data set that included only 2 cultural objects--television shows, songs, magazines, films, etc.--that provided a useful comparison in terms of a sociological issue such as race, gender, or class. For the research-intensive version, students will be performing weekly content analyses of prime time television. I'm spending the summer writing the proposal, developing the protocols, and creating the coding sheet and codebook. I'm trying to develop a process for teaching research that--like my process for teaching writing--is transferable from one class to another...