RC33 SPRING 2021 NEWSLETTER

News from the President : ‘2020: A year of reflection and dedication’

Dear RC33 Members,

I hope this letter finds you well. I had so many expectations for 2020, but none of them came true. It seemed such a beautiful number: 2020. For years we had been planning the RC33 conference on Cyprus to be held in September 2020. But Covid-19 caught us by surprise.

It is such a strange virus. Personally, my family was hit twice. The first time, only one member of my household – my father-in law – was hit. And although he is a senior, he had little to no problem and no one else in the family got infected. So you wonder how easily it spreads and how serious it is. I came to realize two months later, when another family member, perfectly abiding by all Covid-19 regulations, became infected. Within a week, half of my family got infected, including my aunt who had to go to a hospital within a couple of days. She had to be sedated, and even worse, she had to travel – while under sedation – across the Netherlands several times because of the lack of IC beds. Unbelievable how the same disease can be nothing more than a little headache for one, but a struggle for life for another.

It made me realize we made a good decision to postpone our conference in Cyprus. That was such a hard decision. We decided to postpone it rather than have the conference online, since many of us looked forward to meeting each other face to face in Cyprus. However, this decision also resulted in a lack of RC33 activities for 2020 (since the Forum was also postponed and turned into an online version in February 2021), and as a result, lack of new memberships.

Upon writing this letter, we still do not know if we can proceed with a face-to-face in person conference in Cyprus in September 2021. Fortunately there are vaccinations, but it is difficult to predict health circumstances in September across the world. In addition, how comfortable are our colleagues with traveling? What I can promise you is that we will only proceed with the conference when we are convinced it is safe. It may involve some new rules (e.g., fewer people in a room, lots of sanitizers), but we will do everything we can to have a safe environment. I do hope I can speak for you when I say that I feel a great need to meet. Not only to learn from your work in recent years, but also just to meet. It has been too long.

The spread of Covid-19 and its related consequences have also had a huge impact on science, in particular on the social sciences. This year, social science has received a new impulse because when has our research ever become so important? Covid-19 has disrupted countries and economies around the world, and drastically changed the ways we live and work. Will these effects be temporary, or do we take the opportunity to arrive at changes for better living once the immediate threat recedes? I believe social scientists have a major role to play in the recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic. Let’s proceed with giving the world analyses and insights to help guide and target recommendations to policy makers and develop solutions that people are able and willing to follow through on. In a time of a worldwide vaccination program, sharing knowledge about human behavior has never been so important.

I hope you keep supporting RC33 as a loyal member,

Your President,

Vera Toepoel, RC33 President

News from the vice president for finances: RC33 membership fees and finances 2019–2020

Finances

The table below presents a short overview of RC33 finances in 2019-2020, the first two years of this RC board term. Particulars for this period mainly relate to ISA payments and website maintenance:

With regard to the ISA, we received in 2019 their payment of the RC33 membership fees for ISA-RC33 members as paid in the period 2015–2018. ISA disburses those membership fees per board term, meaning that RC33 receives a large amount once every four year. Also in 2019, we received the second half of the ISA grant for realized RC33 activities in 2015–2018, like conferences and journal issues. In 2020, we received similarly the first installment of the new ISA activity grant for 2019–2022.

On the debet side in 2020, besides regular website maintenance, there were some additional costs for further integrating our new membership payment system on the website.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Debet	SAGE-BMS	Transaction costs	Webhosting	Website design	Sum
2020	€1155	€134	€98	€219	€1607
2019	€1882	€152	€91	€78	€2203
Credit	RC33 member fees	ISA member fees	ISA grant	Sum
2020	€614		€560	€1174
2019	€212	€5.206	€490	€5908

In total, the current RC33 account amounts €8645. Given that the long-term average of our yearly cost is about €2500, there’s a reserve of about €6000.

Wander van der Vaart, Vice President for Finances

News from the vice president for information

We have all been forced to change in major ways how we do teaching and research because of the Covid-19 pandemic. This is particularly true concerning how we organise meetings such as conferences, seminars and courses. One of our major tasks now for the BMS-RC33 and AIMSl distribution lists is to very carefully verify the most current state of all such meetings before we distribute any information concerning these meetings over our lists since the situation of such meetings can often be unstable and change rather quickly. We are nonetheless rather fortunate in that our work in communicating among RC33 members and BMS readers and subscribers has been online-based for several decades already. What is new now is that we can have ‘hybred’ forms of meetings that include both in person attendance and online participation, which allows organisers to continue their work of preparation without having to change all arrangments at a moment’s notice due to local, national or worldwide Covid-19 restrictions that change often.

The aspects of our online communications concerning recently published research results, employment possibilities, awards or scholarships have been influenced much less than meetings but still require more attention in terms of checking out the latest details and eventual modifications. There is however continued and perhaps even increasingly smooth communication between RC33 Board members, our distribution lists and the publicly available RC33 website, and this in spite of the Covid-19 pandemic.

There have been a few new but minor problems associated with the increasing use of the Internet for our communications. Since our two distribution lists reach directly over 7,000 sociologists and are in exchange with several other research sociology distribution lists, I have been receiving requests from persons to be removed from our lists. After verification – which sometimes can take time and energy – we have discovered that some lists are forwarding BMS-RC33 materiel to many other readers, including those who ask me to remove their email address when they are not on our two lists but think they are. But as I have said, this is a minor problem.

Please keep in touch, keep your RC33 membership up-to-date, forward interesting information to us and, most of all, stay healthy.

Karl M. van Meter, Vice President for Information

News from the vice president for online communications: looking back at 2020 on the RC33 website

As 2020 was drawing to a close, I was sure that most of you were as relieved as I was and that you were also hoping for a different year in 2021. It was very disappointing not to meet familiar and new faces at the planned 2020 RC33/ISA conferences. Things may get better, worse or stay the same, but so far it seems that the chance of meeting at conferences in 2021 is also unsure. Looking back at the blogs on the RC33 website, it is clear that much of the year was about postponing conferences – first, the First RC20 and Second RC33 Regional Conference - Asia; second, the Fourth ISA Forum of Sociology (now online); third, the Tenth RC33 Conference in Cyprus. We will keep you posted on other planned events as more information becomes available and you can also find updates about these RC33/ISA related events on the Conferences tab.

Although many of our blogs were about conference postponements/changes, there were some other interesting postings this year. Karl van Meter provided information on developments related to the BMS and the former RC33 president, Nina Baur, announced the establishment of the Global Center of Spatial Methods for Urban Sustainability (GCSMUS) at the Technical University of Berlin. I am very proud to say that one of our PhD students, from the Department of Town and Regional Planning at the University of Pretoria, received a scholarship and has already spent a few months at TU Berlin participating in the GCSMUS PhD programme. Many of us experienced challenges with our research this year and Pei-shan Liao’s blog gave us insights into survey practices in Taiwan in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our current president, Vera Toepoel, wrote two blogs keeping RC33 members up to date on changing events. Vera also organized a virtual RC33 Board meeting in September that all but one of us managed to attend given the time differences ranging from Europe to Africa to Asia. The minutes of the Board meeting are available on the website (on the About tab). One of the biggest changes for RC33 last year was the membership fees. We now have a differentiated fee system according to the income of each country, which we hope will open up membership opportunities for low-income countries, and this was implemented on the website for online registration and payment. When I did an analysis of the use of the RC33 website for the Board meeting, it was interesting to note that most traffic on the website is for information on the conferences and reading our blogs. Most website visitors are based in the United States, even though our membership in this country is low – something we will follow up on.

If you have any feedback about the website please contact me via the e-mail address on the Board page. We hope that you have enjoyed reading our blogs last year and that you will continue to connect with us as we ‘travel’ through 2021 together.

Claire Wagner, Vice President for Online Communications

News from the vice president for awards

Dear RC33 Members,

As the year was coming to a close, I wanted to give you a quick update on the state of the first RC33 Awards for Best Paper and Best Paper by a Young Scholar, which would have been given out at the Tenth RC33 Conference in Cyprus, but has been postponed until 7-10 September, 2021. For those of you who had already submitted papers for the awards, this post will be a reminder for the new plans.

First of all, I would like to say how excited I was to receive so many, and such high-quality submissions! In total, we had 10 Best Paper and 8 Best Paper by a Young Scholar entries. The awards committee and I will have our hands full this year when we get down to work on trying to find the winners, but that is very exciting (if daunting)! The applications ranged from papers on statistical innovations, to highly relevant substantive topics, to methodologically focused examinations.

Now, here is an outline of our new plans for the awards in 2021.