Colloquia are generally held the second Wednesday of each month from 3:30-5:00 pm in Savery Hall Room 409, unless noted otherwise.

2011-12

• October 12, 2011 - 3:30 - 5 pm Bruce Western, Harvard University, Department of Sociology

      Trends in Household Income Insecurity

Reception to follow in Savery 245 5:00 - 6:30

• October 19, 2011 - 3:30 - 5 pm   Claudia Andrade, Coimbra University and University of Porto, Portugal

      Perceived Justice in the Division of Family Labor in Couples: A social psychological perspective

    Reception to follow in Savery 245 5:00 - 6:30

• FRIDAY November 18 - 12:00 - 1:30 pm  Daniel Lanier-Vos, University of Southern California, Department of Sociology

      No Free Gifts:  Philanthropy, investment, and the production of Irish and Jewish national attachments in

      the United States       Lanier-Vos

 

2010-11

• November 8, 2010 - 12 Noon:  Shamus Khan, Department of Sociology, Columbia University

Privilege: Teaching Adolescent Elites at St. Paul's School

St. Paul's School in Concord, NY has long been the exclusive domain of America's wealthiest sons.  But today, a new elite of boys and girls is being molded at St. Paul's, one that reflects the hope of openness but also the persistence of inequality.  Drawing on his forthcoming book, Privilege,Kahn returns to his Alma Mater to give an inside look at an institution that has been the private realm of the elite for the past 150 years.  Through ethnographic portrayals of the relationships among students, faculty, and staff, he shows how members of the new elite face the opening of society while preserving the advantages that allow them to rule.

• January 18, 2011:  Amon Emeka, Department of Sociology, University of Southern California
• January 28, 2011:  Dora Costa, Department of Economics, University of California-Los Angeles
• February 16, 2011- 12 Noon with Reception to Follow:  Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California-Berkeley (Joint with CSDE & the West Coast Poverty Center)

  Citizenship as Local Practice: Race, Gender, and Recognition

  From a sociological perspective, citizenship, particularly substantive citizenship, is fundamentally a matter of belonging, including recognition by other members of the community.   In this conception, citizenship is not simply a fixed legal status, but a fluid and contested status.   Historical and contemporary examples illustrate the ways in which boundaries of membership are continually created and challenged in everyday interactions as well as through organized struggles.

• February 18, 2011:  Quincy Stewart, Department of Sociology, Indiana University (Joint with CSDE)
• March 4, 2011:  Michael White, Department of Sociology, Brown University
• April 20, 2011: Kim Weeden, Department of Sociology, Cornell University
• April 27, 2011:  Carolyn Pinedo-Turnovsky, University of California-Santa Barbara (Visiting Assistant Professor, American Ethnic Studies, University of Washington)
• May (Date TBA): Teresa Gowan, Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota
• June 2, 2011:   Stephanie Coontz, History and Women's Studies, The Evergreen State College

2009-10

• May 19, 2010:  Erin Kelly, University of Minnesota

   Changing Workplaces to Reduce Work-Family Conflict: Schedule Control in a

   White-Collar Organization

Work-family conflicts are common and consequential for employees, their families, and work organizations. Can workplaces be changed in ways that reduce work-family conflict? We contend that increasing schedule control or “flexibility” is a promising mechanism for reducing work-family conflict and improving work-family fit. We evaluate this claim using longitudinal data collected from 659 employees of a white-collar organization before and after a workplace initiative was implemented. The analysis provides clear and strong evidence that these workplace changes increased employees' schedule control and that schedule control positively affected the work-family interface. Previous research demonstrates that higher-status workers are much more likely to have flexible schedules and be able to work from home, but this study demonstrates the benefits of workplace interventions for increasing schedule control and the importance of schedule control as a mechanism for reducing conflicts between work and the rest of life.

• Thursday, April 29, 2010:  Gi-Wook Shin, Stanford

   One Alliance, Two Lenses: American-Republic of Korea Relations in a New Era

One Alliance, Two Lenses examines U.S. Korea relations in a short but dramatic period (1992-2003) that witnessed the end of the Cold War, South Korea's full democratization, inter-Korean engagement, two nuclear crises, and the start of the U.S. war on terror. These events have led to a new era of challenges and opportunities for U.S. - South Korea (ROK) relations. Based on analysis of newly collected data major American and Korean newspapers, he will present that the two allies have developed different lenses through which they view their relationship. Gi-Wook Shin also argues that U.S.-ROK relations, linked to the issue of national identity for Koreans, are largely treated as a matter of policy for Americans - a difference stemming from each nation's relative power and role in the international system.

• April 28, 2010: Marion Fourcade, UC Berkeley

   Lost in Translation: Experts in the Amoco Cadiz Trial

Science studies scholars have long noticed that the extensive use of experts in the U.S. legal system means that law and science mutually influence each other (Jasanoff, 1996). On the one hand, legal cases and court procedures shape professional and scientific settlements; on the other hand, expert testimonies influence legal outcomes. But how do they do so? Based on an in-depth study of the Amoco Cadiz litigation (1986-7), this paper develops a model for thinking systematically about the micro-sociological processes (both formal and informal) through which expertise is incorporated and used by the law. We identify three key processes –the “qualification of persons”, the “qualification of jurisdictions” and the “qualification of methods”– and show how their enactment in court reveals and, in some cases, disrupts, the social structure behind both the judicial system and the worlds of expertise.

• Monday, April 26, 2010 (Parrington Hall Forum, 12:30 pm-2:00 pm):  Erik Olin Wright, University of Wisconsin, Madison

    Envisioning Real Utopias

Rising inequality of income and power, along with the recent convulsions in the finance sector, have made the search for alternatives to unbridled capitalism more urgent than ever. Yet there has been a global retreat by the Left: on the assumption that liberal capitalism is the only game in town, political theorists tend to dismiss as utopian any attempt to rethink our social and economic relations. As Fredric Jameson first argued, it is now easier for us to imagine the end of the world than an alternative to capitalism.

Erik Olin Wright's Envisioning Real Utopias is a comprehensive assault on the quietism of contemporary social theory. Building on a lifetime's work analyzing the class system in the developed world, as well as exploring the problem of the transition to a socialist alternative, Wright has now completed a systematic reconstruction of the core values and feasible goals for Left theorists and political actors.

Envisioning Real Utopias aims to put the social back into socialism, laying the foundations for a set of concrete, emancipatory alternatives to the capitalist system. Characteristically rigorous and engaging, this will become a landmark of social thought for the twenty-first century.

• March 10, 2010:  Andreas Wimmer, UCLA

    Nationalism’s rise to power across the world. An event history analysis of a global

     dataset, 1816-2001

Comparative historical sociology has debated for decades how to best understand the global spread of the nation-state as the core political institution of the modern era. The paper tests modernization, diffusion, and power-configurational theories with a new dataset that covers almost the entire world. It shows that the global spread of the nation-state is driven by proximate and contextual political factors situated on the local and regional levels, rather than by domestic forces such as industrialization and the rise of mass literacy, or by the increasing influence of world polity models. 

Andreas Wimmer's research aims to understand the dynamics of nation-state formation, ethnic boundary making and political conflict from a comparative perspective (see the research pages for current projects). His writings show how nation-building politicizes ethnic difference, and under which conditions various forms of exclusion and conflict along ethnic, national or racial lines result. He has pursued this theme across several disciplinary fields, focusing on examples from both the developing and the developed world, and using various methodological and analytical strategies: anthropological field research (in Mexico and Iraq), network studies (in Swiss immigrant neighborhoods and among American college students), quantitative cross-national research (on wars and ethnic conflicts), a comparative historical analysis of Swiss, Iraqi, and Mexican nation-state formation, as well as policy oriented research on immigration and the prevention of ethnic conflict.

 

His other areas of research include theories of culture and social change. He has developed a model ofcultural negotiation and compromise to study a wide variety of seemingly disparate phenomena such asethnic boundary making, mythical narration, nation-building and cross-cultural love. Several of these studies have recently been brought together in a new book. This theory of cultural transformation also provided the basis for two earlier books that compared the different paths along which indigenous communities in Mexico and Guatemala evolved over the past two hundred years, depending on initial conditions as well as the subsequent transformations of power relations at the local level. Seeking to understand the general methodological and theoretical problems involved in understanding such processes, he has edited a volume that discusses various post-mechanistic, non-linear models of change from the natural sciences, economics and the social sciences.

• Tuesday, February 9, 2010 (Communications 120, 3:30 pm): Gina Neff, UW Communication

      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, 2009:  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

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.

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.

2008-09

• 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, CUNYGender 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.

2007-08

• 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

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

2006-2007

 

• May 9, 2007:  Debra Minkoff, Barnard College
• 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

2005-2006

• 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