Journals and Research Workshops
The Center for Culture, Organizations, and Politics
The Center for Culture, Organizations, and Politics (CCOP) has been formed to explore sociological, political, and historical institutional perspectives on the construction of social institutions. The Center began as an informal seminar organized in 1996. The main activity of the Center will be a workshop that meets every two weeks. The seminar is composed of graduate students and faculty from Sociology, Political Science, and the Law School. The seminar discusses mostly graduate student research papers.
The Center has organized many activities over the years. It sponsored a conference with the France-Berkeley Fund on "Media in France and the U.S." that produced a recent book edited by Rod Benson. The Center sponsored another conference that brought leading scholars together to discuss the newly emerging field of economic sociology. Scholars at the conference worked to form the Economic Sociology Section of the ASA. The Center has co-sponsored a speakers' series in cooperation with the Institute for Government Studies on "Institutional Analysis in the Social Sciences." The Center housed the Sloan Foundation's Project "The Corporation as a Social Institution". This project brought together graduate students from many disciplines and universities across America for meetings in Berkeley and funded their research on corporations. The Center continues to provide small grants to support the research of graduate students from different departments who are involved in the seminar.
The CCOP has a website, if you wish to be added to the mailing list, please contact Neil Fligstein.
Interdisciplinary Immigration Workshop
In September 2003, Professor Irene Bloemraad (Sociology) established the Interdisciplinary Immigration Workshop with funding from the Institute of Industrial Relations. While the Berkeley campus housed numerous individuals with an expertise on immigration and a few area centers with an interest in migrants from a specific region, there was no single forum to bring together scholars of migration and immigrant integration. The Workshop was founded to provide such a venue and to serve as a forum for intense, personalized discussion of members’ current research project.
The goals of the workshop are three-fold:
- To provide an interdisciplinary forum for workshop members to get intense, personalized feedback on their immigration-related research projects;
- To serve as a venue for information dissemination among members; and
- To provide a forum for inviting guest speakers to talk about immigration matters to the Berkeley campus and interested community members.
Berkeley Journal of Sociology
The editors of the BJS are graduate students in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. We publish, in one volume each year, well-researched, theoretically interesting papers on contemporary topics in sociology and related fields. Some years we focus on a specific topic or sub-field, while in others we accept articles without regard for the specific topic addressed, though we tend to favour works of a critical political persuasion. The journal mostly publishes papers by graduate students (both from Berkeley and elsewhere) and untenured faculty, and has in recent years also featured a contribution of some kind by a leading member of the discipline--Craig Calhoun and Arthur Stinchcombe, among others, and this year Juliet Schor. (Stinchcombe was once a member of the BJS editorial board, as were other notables such as Ann Swidler and Randall Collins.)
Ethnography
Ethnography is a new international, interdisciplinary journal for the ethnographic study of social and cultural change. It will become the leading network of dialogical exchanges between monadic ethnographers and those from all disciplines involved and interested in ethnography and society; it seeks to promote embedded research that fuses close-up observation, rigorous theory and social critique.