Colloquia are
generally held the second Wednesday of each month from 3:30-5:00
pm in Savery Hall Room 409, unless noted otherwise.
- May 19: Erin Kelly,
University of Minnesota
Title TBD
- Thursday, April 29: Gi-Wook
Shin, Stanford -
3:30 pm - Savery 409
One Alliance, Two Lenses: American-Republic
of Korea Relations in a New Era
- April 28: Marion Fourcade,
UC Berkeley
Lost in Translation: Foreign Experts
in U.S. courts
- March 10: Andreas Wimmer,
UCLA
Nationalism’s rise to power across the world. An
event history analysis of a global
dataset, 1816-2001
- Tuesday, February
9: Gina Neff,
UW Communication - 3:30 pm - Communications
120
Media Labor: Challenges and
Opportunities in the Digital Era
Media and entertainment
industries are undergoing significant restructuring.
"Old" media are strugggling to adapt in "new"
media environments with increased competition for audiences,
plummeting advertising revenue, and uncertain business
models for content. In this talk Neff will provide
a framework for thinking through the valorization of media
content in these emerging market conditions, with a particular
focus on the work involved in making media pruducts with
the people who do this communication work. She will
do this by comparing three aspects of change in the way
today's media institutions manage labor: 1) the response
of organized media and entertainment labor unions to digital
distribution of products; 2) the proliferation of "reality"
narratives in media content; and 3) the growing distribution
of user-generated content, exemplified by YouTube.
Only through specific study of the organization of coummunication
workers and the evolving character of media pruducts can
we fully understand the changing political economy of
cultural industries -- and the implication for contemporary
labor in general.
Gina
Neff is assistant professor in the Department
of Communication. She is co-editor of Surviving
the New Economy(Paradigm 2007), which examines work
in both new and old media after the dot-com crash, and
is author of a manuscript Venture Labor: Work and
the Burden of Risk in Innnovative Industries.
- Tuesday,
October 6: Aaron Gullickson,
University of Oregon
Racial Boundary Formation at the Dawn of
Jim Crow: The Determinants and
Effects of Black/Mulatto Occupational
Differences in the United States, 1880
There will be
a reception in Savery 245 immediately after the colloquium.
Abstract of Talk
Much of the literature within sociology regarding mixed-race
populations focuses on contemporary issues and dynamics,
often overlooking a larger historical literature. This
paper provides a historical perspective on these issues
by exploiting regional variation in the United States
in the degree of occupational differentiation between
blacks and mulattoes in the 1880 Census, during a transitionary
period from slavery to freedom. The analysis reveals that
the role of the mixed-race category as either a “buffer
class” or a status threat depended upon the class
composition of the white population. Black/mulatto occupational
differentiation was greatest in areas where whites had
a high level of occupational prestige and thus little
to fear from an elevated mulatto group. Furthermore, the
effect of black/mulatto occupational differentiation on
lynching varied by the occupational status of whites.
In areas where whites were of relatively low status, black/mulatto
differentiation increased the risk of lynching, while
in areas where whites were of relatively high status,
black/mulatto differentiation decreased the risk of lynching.
Aaron Gullickson's Biographical Sketch
Professor Gullickson received his B.A. in Sociology from
the University of Washington in 1998, and received his
PhD in Sociology and Demography from the University of
California, Berkeley in 2004. He held an Assistant Professor
position at Columbia University from 2004 to 2007 before
joining the University of Oregon faculty in September
2007. His research focuses on the nexus of inequality,
race, ethnicity, and kinship. Professor Gullickson is
currently engaged in a broad research project examining
the development of the one-drop rule and the stratification
of mixed-race individuals in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century.
- October 22, 2008: Jonathan Wender,
University of Washington: Walking Away from People's
Problems: Phenomenological Reflections on the Limits of
Bureaucratic Policing.
For this colloquium, Jonathan
Wender will discuss the final chapter of his new book,
Policing and the Poetics of Everyday Life .
The book takes a unique approach to the investigation
of several abiding issues at the center of criminological
and sociological inquiry by engaging them from a standpoint
grounded in philosophy and aesthetics. This study by
a self-described “philosopher-cop” develops a phenomenological
interpretation of police-citizen encounters, revealing
the importance of metaphysics in everyday life through
a disclosure of the grounding principles that inform
the bureaucratic approach to human predicaments. Jonathan
M. Wender, a social philosopher and veteran police sergeant,
brings a refreshing new voice to academic and practical
discussions of social questions that are otherwise addressed
almost exclusively from a narrow scientific or administrative
perspective.
- November 21, 2008 (Friday): Cynthia Fuchs-Epstein,
CUNY: Gender
Regimes and Knowledge Politics
Professor
Epstein is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the
Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
In 2006, she served as President of the American Sociological
Association. She has served as a fellow at the
Guggenheim Foundation, and as a White House appointee
to the Committee on the Economic Role of Women, and
as an advisor to the White House on affirmative action
policies. Her many prominent publications include
The Part-Time Paradox: Time Norms, Professional Life,
Family and Gender (with Carroll Seron, Bonnie Oglensky,
and Robert Saute: Routledge 1999), Deceptive Distinctions:
Sex, Gender, and the Social Order (Russell Sage Foundation
1988), and "Great Divides: The Cultural, Cognitive,
and Social Bases of the Global Subordination of Women"
( American Sociological Review 2007).
- December 4, 2008 (Thursday) - 12:00 Noon :
Clem Brooks, Indiana University, Bloomington:
Rights Reversal? Policy, Opinion, and Feedback in the
Post-9/11 Era
Since the terrorist attacks
of September 11th, 2001, new legislation such as the
Patriot and Military Commissions Acts have set in place
limitations on individual liberties and constitutional
protections. In doing so, post-9/11 legislative and
policy changes begin to slow or even ratchet-back the
widely-discussed “rights revolution” that
originated in the 1960’s. How much support does
the rights reversal and these new policies have? And
is there evidence of policy feedback, where the passage
of legislation itself influences mass opinion? We investigate
these questions using data from a new, 2007 national
survey. Embedded survey experiments suggest greater
malleability and lower support when counter-terrorist
policies are described in abstract terms without reference
to the details of actual legislation. Multivariate results
provide evidence that education, ideology, and especially
nationalism shape underlying policy attitudes. Implications
for understanding policy feedback processes and existing
theories of rights support are discussed.
Clem Brooks
is Rudy Professor of Sociology at Indiana University,
Bloomington. His research is in the fields of American
politics, comparative social policy, and political psychology.
With Jeff Manza, he is the author of Why Welfare States
Persist (University of Chicago Press 2007), and Social
Cleavages and Political Change (Oxford University Press
1999). With funding from the European Science Foundation
and the Russell Sage Foundation, Brooks is studying
the dynamics of policy attitudes toward social welfare,
civil liberties, and counter-terrorism.
- January 21, 2009: Lane Kenworthy,
University of Arizona, Growth, Redistribution, and Poverty
Lane Kenworthy
is Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the
University of Arizona. His research focuses on the
causes and consequences of poverty, inequality, mobility,
employment, economic growth, and social policy in the
United States and other affluent countries. In
the past few years, Lane has published two books, Jobs
with Equality (Oxford University Press), and Egalitarian
Capitalism (Russell Sage Foundation), along with numerous
articles exploring the relationships between redistributive
policies, economic growth, and public opinion in the
United States and abroad.
- February 6, 2009 (1:30-3:00): Howard
Kimeldorf, University of Michigan, Rethinking
American Labor, Co-sponsored by the Harry Bridges
Center for Labor Studies
The American working class
has long been regarded as “exceptional” in comparison
to its European counterparts. This contrast is especially
evident, we are told, in the failure of radical unionism
during the early twentieth-century when the conservative
American Federation of Labor, championing a narrow form
of “business unionism,” defeated its left-wing rivals
led by the Industrial Workers of the World, a self-described
revolutionary union.
Critically interrogating this perspective, Kimeldorf
will offer an alternative account of this fateful clash
between the AFL and IWW, arguing that both organizations,
despite their contrasting ideological commitments, were
anchored in a common syndicalist organizational logic
defined by its distinctive reliance on worker self-activity
and direct economic action.. Seeing American labor as
something more than failed radicalism, as instead practicing
a kind of syndicalism opens up fresh possibilities for
understanding its exceptional history as well as its
possible future.
Bio:
Howard Kimeldorf, Chair of the Department of Sociology,
University of Michigan, is the author of "Battling
for American Labor: Wobblies, Craft Workers and the
Making of the Union Movement" (University of California
Press, 1999) and "Reds or Rackets? The Making of Radical
and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront" (University
of California Press, 1988).
- May 18, 2009 (noon): Eviatar Zerubavel,
Rutgers University, The Genealogical Imagination: A Case-Study
in Cognitive Sociology
This presentation offers a
cognitive sociological perspective on the way we organize
ancestry, descent, and other (e.g., familial, ethnic,
national) forms of genealogical "relatedness" in our
minds. Examining the conventional-normative as well
as political context in which we construct in our collective
imagination essentialized sociomental structures such
as "bloodlines," "race," dynasties, and family trees,
it highlights the way in which culture interacts with
nature in the social organization of human memory.
Professor
Zerubavel (Ph.D. in 1976 from the University of Pennsylvania)
is Board of Governors Professor of Sociology at Rutgers
University , where he has been teaching since 1988.
- May 20, 2009 (noon): Mary
Pattillo, Northwestern University, The Mixed
Blessings of Mixed Income Communities
Mary Pattillo uses the
historic rise, alarming fall, and equally dramatic
renewal of Chicago's North Kenwood-Oakland neighborhood
to explore the politics of race and class in contemporary
urban America. There was a time when North Kenwood-Oakland
was plagued by gangs, drugs, violence, and the font
of poverty from which they sprang. But in the late
1980s, activists rose up to tackle the social problems
that had plagued the area for decades. Her book, Black
on the Block, tells the remarkable story of how these
residents laid the groundwork for a revitalized and
self-consciously black neighborhood that continues
to flourish today. But theirs is not a tale of easy
consensus and political unity, and here Pattillo teases
out the divergent class interests that have come to
define black communities like North Kenwood-Oakland.
She explores the often heated battles between haves
and have-nots, home owners and apartment dwellers,
and newcomers and old-timers as they clash over the
social implications of gentrification. Along the way,
Pattillo highlights the conflicted but crucial role
that middle-class blacks play in transforming such
districts as they negotiate between established centers
of white economic and political power and the needs
of their less fortunate black neighbors.
Bio: Mary Patillo is Professor of Sociology and African
American Studies, Faculty Affiliate at the Institute
for Policy Research. She received her Ph.D. from the
University of Chicago in 1997. Pattillo's areas of
interest include race and ethnicity (specifically
the black middle class), urban sociology, and qualitative
methods. Pattillo uses the city of Chicago as her
laboratory and strives to be an expert in Chicago
history, politics, and social life. In her book, Black
Picket Fences (University of Chicago Press 1999),
Pattillo investigates the economic, spatial, and cultural
forces that affect child-rearing and youth socialization
in a black middle class neighborhood on Chicago's
South Side. Black Picket Fences won the Oliver Cromwell
Cox Best Book Award from the American Sociological
Association. She has published articles in American
Sociological Review, Social Forces, Ethnic and Racial
Studies, and other journals. She is also co-editor
of Imprisoning America: The Social Effects of Mass
Incarceration (Russell Sage, 2004). Her most recent
book, Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and
Class in the City (University of Chicago Press) examines
the simultaneous processes of low-income housing construction
and gentrification in a black Chicago neighborhood.
Pattillo is a founding board member and active participant
in Urban Prep Charter Academy, the first all-boys
public charter high school in Chicago.
- June 2, 2008 (Monday): Kristen Harknett,
University of Pennsylvania (joint with the West Coast
Poverty Center), Social Work Building
- May 12 (Monday), 12:00-1:30, Frank Furstenberg,
University of Pennsylvania, Visiting Professor UW-Sociology:
Families-in-the Middle: A Comparative Study of how
the Middle Class Manages.
- April 25, 2008 (Friday, Parrington Commons), 12:30-2:00:
Mario Small, University of Chicago: How Representative
are Chicago Ghettos? Organizational Density, Outlier Cities,
and Neighborhood Effects, (Joint with the West Coast
Poverty Center and the Center for Studies in Demography
and Ecology)
Mario Small
is an associate professor of Sociology at the University
of Chicago. He received his PhD from Harvard University
(2001) and taught at Princeton University before joining
U of C. He's been a visiting scholar at New York University
and Columbia University. He is the author of numerous
articles including the award-winning "Culture,
Cohorts, and Social Organization Theory" (AJS 2002).
His book, Villa Victoria (Chicago 2004), was awarded
both the C. Wright Mills Book Award and the Robert E.
Park Book Award.
http://home.uchicago.edu/~mariosmall/
One of the most important factors affecting conditions
in an urban neighborhood is the number of banks, clinics,
grocery stores, recreation centers, and other commercial
and nonprofit establishments-i.e., its organizational
density. The "deinstitutionalized ghetto"
hypothesis, based largely on research in the city of
Chicago, has argued that the loss of organizational
density is a major consequence of the concentration
of poverty at the neighborhood level. The hypothesis,
however, has been subject to little empirical scrutiny.
This article performs the first comprehensive test across
all U.S. cities of the hypothesis that concentrated
poverty reduces the density of a wide array of establishments.
We find that there is little support for the hypothesis
across a remarkable range of organizations; that the
special case of Chicago differs from the average city;
and that regional location and the general economic
climate of a city are the most important predictors
of organizational density. Findings suggest moving toward
a perspective in which conditions in poor neighborhoods,
and by extension "neighborhood effects," depend
systematically on the historical and geographic contingencies
of separate regions of the country and on the political
economy of the city.
- April 21, 2008 (Monday), 12:00-1:30, Karl-Dieter
Opp, Collective Identity, Rationality and
Collective Political Action
Abstract
This paper explores the effects of collective identity
on protest behavior by applying an extended version
of the theory of action. Hypotheses are derived on the
following questions that are rarely addressed in the
literature: Has identity only additive effects or also
multiplicative effects? Are there situations when collective
identity diminishes protest?
Does collective identity have indirect effects - via
the determinants of protest - on protest behavior? Are
there feedback effect of protest participation on collective
identity? The hypotheses that address these questions
are tested by a three-wave panel study. Three findings
seem most important. (1) The overall direct effects
of identity on protest behavior are small. (2) We provide
evidence that under certain conditions identity does
not raise but reduce protest. (3) The major effects
of identity areindirect: identity influences the determinants
of protest.
KARL-DIETER OPP is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at
the University of Leipzig, Germany, and Affiliate Professor
at the University of Washington (Seattle). His areas
of interest include collective action and political
protest, rational choice theory, philosophy of the social
sciences and the emergence and effects of norms and
institutions. He is author of The Rationality of Political
Protest (1989), coauthor of The Origins of a Spontaneous
Revolution (1995) and editor (with M. Hechter) of Social
Norms (2001). He has just finished a book manuscript
on Theories of Political Protest and Social Movements.
He has recently been involved in a long-term empirical
research project on the causes and effects of identification
with territorial groups such as nations or Europe. His
articles were published in scholarly journals such as
the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Rationality
and Society, American Political Science Review and the
American Journal of Political Science.
- April 4, 2008: Arne Kalleberg,
University of North Carolina: Precarious Work, Insecure
Workers: A Global Challenge
Arne L. Kalleberg is a Kenan Distinguished Professor
of Sociology and the Director of International Programs
in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received his
B.A. from Brooklyn College and his M.S. and Ph.D.
from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He was
a Professor of Sociology at Indiana University-Bloomington
before joining the faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1986.
He has published more than 100 articles and chapters
and ten books on topics related to the sociology of
work, organizations, occupations and industries, labor
markets, and social stratification. His most recent
books are The Mismatched Worker (W.W. Norton, 2007)
and Ending Poverty in America: ow to Restore the American
Dream (co-edited with John Edwards and Marion Crain,
New Press, 2007). He is the 2008 President of the
American Sociological Association.
- March 19, 2008: Andy Andrews,
University of North Carolina: Making the News: How
Social Movement Organizations Shape the Public Agenda
Kenneth (Andy)
Andrews is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses
on social movements, political institutions, and social
change. Andrews is completing projects on the environmental
movement in North arolina and a national study of local
Sierra Club leaders and organizations. In another project,
he is studying tactical and organizational diffusion
and the dynamics of local protest campaigns through
a study of the 1960 sit-ins by black college students.
His book - Freedom is a Constant Struggle (Chicago,
2004) - examined the influence of the civil rights movement
on electoral politics, school desegregation, and social
policies.
Abstract
Increasingly,
scholars have come to see the news media playing a crucial
role shaping whether social movements are able to bring
about broader social change. By conferring attention
to issues, claims, and their supporters, the news media
can shape the public agenda thereby influencing public
opinion, authorities and elites. Why are some social
movement organizations more successful than others at
advancing their claims in the media? Specifically, what
organizational, tactical, and issue characteristics
enhance media attention? I combine detailed organizational
data from a representative survey of 187 local environmental
organizations in North Carolina with complete news coverage
of those organizations in eleven major daily newspapers
in the two years following the survey (2,143 articles).
Rather than focusing on confrontational, volunteer-led
groups that advocate on behalf of novel issues, analyses
reveal that local news media favor professional and
formalized groups that employ "routine" tactics
working on issues that overlap with newspapers' attention
to local economic growth and well-being.
- February 21, 2008 (Thursday): Rand Conger,
University of California-Davis: Intergenerational
Continuity in Economic Hardship
Rand Conger
is a distinguished professor of human development, family
studies, and psychology at the University of California
- Davis. Professor Conger's program of research focuses
on social, economic, cultural and individual characteristics
that either increase or reduce risk for social and emotional
problems, substance abuse, and psychiatric disorders
over time. His research has underscored the importance
of economic and related stressors for family and individual
development. More recently his work has focused on interconnections
among multiple generations in the same family. Professor
Conger received his PhD in Sociology from the University
of Washington.
Abstract
There is good evidence that economic circumstances in
one generation of families affect the economic fortunes
of the next generation. One hypothesis suggests that
these continuities are based on enmeshment in broader
economic structures while the second proposes that more
advantaged parents invest more heavily in the human
capital of their children which leads to greater economic
success. Data from 558 study participants followed from
early adolescence to almost 30 years of age evaluates
the credibility of these hypotheses as explanations
for intergenerational continuity in economic hardship.
- February 5, 2008 (Tuesday): Martin Reisebrodt,
Sociology and Divinity School, University of Chicago:
Theses on a Theory of Religion
Steve Pfaff and Katie Corcoran
will comment.
Martin Riesebrodt is a Professor in Sociology and Divinity
at the University of Chicago. His academic interests
are in social theory, the historical and comparative
sociology of religion, and the relationship between
religion, politics, and secular culture. Professor Riesebrodt
has published on the theory of religion, its comparative
history, and the foundations for a Weberian theory of
religion. Presently, he is working on a book about how
modernizing states and reforming bureaucracies have
imagined and institutionalized religion.
- January 16, 2008: Gary Hamilton,
Sociology and the Jackson School of International Studies,
University of Washington, Global Commodity Chains,
Market Makers, and the Rise of Demand-Responsive
- November 27, 2007 (Tuesday): James Mahoney,
Northwestern University, The Causal Logic of Historical
Explanation
- November 5, 2007 (Monday), 12-1:30 pm: Shelly
Correll, Cornell University, Workplace Evaluations
of Mothers and Others
- October 12, 2007 (Friday): Debra Minkoff,
Barnard College, Variety and Voice in the U.S. Advocacy
Sector
- May 9, 2007: Debra Minkoff, Barnard College, TBA
- April 27, 2007: Scott Eliason, University of Minnesota
(jointly sponsored with CSDE), Market Attainments
over the Early Adult Life Course: Evidence from the Youth
Development Study, 12:30-2:00 pm, Parrington Commons
- April 25, 2007: Robin Stryker, University of Minnesota,
Redefining Compassion to Reform Welfare: How Supporters
of 1990s US Federal Welfare Reform Aimed for the Moral
High Ground
- April 20, 2007: Mark Warr, Texas, Safe at
Home: The Transition from Public to Private Life in the
United States, 1960-2000 (jointly sponsored as part
of the Deviance Seminar series)
- April 11, 2007: Richard Whitley, University of
Manchester Business School, The Comparative Analysis
of Competing Capitalisms and their Change
- January 17, 2007: Wendy Cadge, Brandeis, Paging
God: Religion in the Halls of Medicine (jointly sponsored
by the Center on Comparative Religion)
- January 9, 2007: Miguel Centeno, Princeton, The
Failure of Liberalism in the Iberian World, 12:30
pm, Savery 110C.
- October 25, 2006: Dario Melossi, University of
Bologna, Italy, Second Generations in Italy:
A Self-Report Study
- October 18, 2006: John Logan, Brown University,
New Orleans AFTER Katrina: Whose City
- May 10, 2006: Daniyal Zuberi, University of British
Columbia, Differences That Matter: Social Policy and
the
Working Poor in the United States and Canada
- May 12, 2006: John Butler, University of Texas,
STANDING ON SHOULDERS: A Dialogue on the Sociology
of Economics, Work and Race and Ethnic Relations
- April 12, 2006: Nikki Jones,University of California-Santa
Barbara, Working 'the Code': Girls, Gender, and Inner
City Violence
- December 8, 2005: Andrew Noymer, University of
California-Berkeley, Who Dies in Flu Pandemics: Lessons
from the 1918 'Spanish Flu'
- November 9, 2005: Michael Hechter, Alien
Rule and Its Discontents
- October 12, 2005: Steven Pfaff, Explaining
a Religious Anomaly: A Historical Analysis of Atheism
in E. Germany
2004-2005
- May 13, 2005: Barry Lee, Pennsylvania State University,
Side by Side? The Elusive Goal of Racial Integration
in an Urban Neighborhood
- May 11, 2005: Jeremy Freese, University of Wisconsin-Madison,
Cognitive ability, personality, and the sociology of response
to social change: The case of Internet adoption
April 13, 2005: Roger Waldinger, University
of California-Los Angeles, Nationalizing Foreigners
- April 15, 2005: Ivan Ermakoff, University of Wisconsin-Madison,
French compliance with German occupation policy during
the Second World War
- March 9, 2005: Devah Pager, Princeton University,
Discrimination in Low Wage Labor Markets
- February 16, 2005: Kieran Healy, University of
Arizona, Last Best Gifts: Altruism and the Market
for Human Blood and Organs
- January 26, 2005: Marta Tienda, Princeton University,
Capitalizing on Segregation, Pretending Neutrality:
College Enrollment and the Texas Top 10% Law
- January 12, 2005: Brian Gifford, States, Soldiers,
and Social Welfare: Armed Forces and the Welfare State
- December 8, 2004: Peter Marsden, Harvard University,
Informants in Establishment Surveys
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