Colloquia
Sociology Department Colloquium Series
Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
MONDAYS, 2:00 - 3:30 PM
[unless otherwise noted]
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Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
Abstract: This talk focuses on the key role of medical experts in changing ideas about gender and the body in Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of the political upheaval of the 1960s. The fashioning of one’s body and its cultivation, criticized as a bourgeois holdover in the Stalinist 1950s, came to be demanded from below and promoted from above as part of socialist lifestyle in the 1970s. Embedded in a transnational circulation of discourses and practices – bodily health, fitness as well as aesthetics - medical experts in socialist Czechoslovakia helped facilitate the emergence of new conceptions of femininity and masculinity, and increasingly promoted the link between the body and individual self-realization. As the talk shows, processes generally associated with the post-1989 transformations emerged already in the late socialist period.
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Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
Abstract: In 1996, Thomas LaVeist instructed social science health researchers to “continue to study race… but do a better job.” Reviews consistently suggests health studies control for race and ethnicity without defining, and often don’t account for racism. Dr. Pirtle will overview interventions of her empirical research, informed by critical race theory, that utilizes multidimensional measures of race and ethnicity, and structural measures of racism to explore health outcomes for Black, Latinx, and other populations of color. The talk demonstrates that using theoretically informed measures of race, ethnicity, and racism help us to do a better job refining our understanding of racialized health associations and clarifying mechanisms of racism in shaping health inequities.
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Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building & Via Zoom
In the Western, or more specifically, U.S.-dominated social sciences, people of color outside or within the West have historically been reduced to “research subjects,” and their role as knowledge producers has been marginalized. Precipitating such practices was the European and U.S. formal colonization of different parts of the world. In recent decades, there have been efforts to decolonize social science. Does greater “inclusion” of scholars of color within the existing knowledge production system achieve the decolonization goal? Or does the U.S. fundamentally reproduce the same hierarchical power relations within its informal empire through such “inclusion”? To address these questions, I will introduce the concept of “control by manipulation,” which is divided into “psychological warfare” and “behavioral modification,” and sketch a model of the way the U.S.
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Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
Studies show that Black women are targeted in the workplace for their decisions to dawn natural hairstyles (Koval and Rosette 2021, Greene 2012, Dawson et al. 2019). And media attention has shed light on the disproportionate policing of black bodies and, more specifically, those who choose to wear natural hair styling options. Black women and Black children are the most visible targets for natural hair policing and have been subject to various consequences when their natural hairstyles do not meet dress code policies at work and school. As the Crown Act gains recognition around the country and adoption throughout the country, it remains critical to understand the global experiences of Black women who choose to wear natural hairstyles. Scholarship on race and emotions needs more empirical studies that provide intersectional framing of experiences specific to people of color.
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Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
Abstract
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Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
In recent years, city leaders, law enforcement, and news outlets have warned that digital social media—platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram—are amplifying the frequency and severity of urban violence. In turn, police departments and prosecutors increasingly rely on social media content to secure arrests, convictions, and sentences. Despite this development, however, there is surprisingly scant empirical data capable of disentangling the relationship between social media and violence. Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork alongside gang-associated youth and their peer networks on Chicago’s South Side, combined with interviews with public defenders and analyses of court cases throughout the US, I propose a framework to begin understanding this relationship more systematically and sociologically.
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Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
The assumption that in China before the 20th century the examination system made it possible for men to qualify for appointment as an official based on their talent and without regard to their family background underpins claims that the imperial bureaucracy was meritocratic. However, decades of empirical investigations of the family backgrounds of examination degree holders have yielded conflicting results about the possibilities for upward mobility into educational and bureaucratic elites via the exams. I advance the debate on the role of family background by shifting the focus from exam degree attainment to appointment and promotion as an official. By analysis of examination records and career histories, I show that between 1830 and 1911, men whose patrilineal ancestors held degrees or who had been officials were advantaged not only when it came to the progression from one stage of the examination system to the next, but also when it came to being appointed.
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Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
In recent decades, Israel has become known as a tech powerhouse – the country is fondly referred to as a “start-up nation.” Yet Israel’s current fame in developing and exporting cyber technologies is only the latest phase in a longer history, in which part of Israel’s export-led economic development focused on security products and services, including weapons, military training, drones, and intelligence collection. In contrast to the sociological scholarship that stresses state support in explaining economic development, I draw on the case of Israel to study the role of the military in such development – and what consequences such security-oriented development has. Rather than assuming a “military-industrial complex” with an inappropriate influence on government policies, however, I am interested in the very complex relations between the military and the industry, on the one hand, and the changing relations between the government and the military-industrial nexus on the other. Drawing on the case of the spyware industry in particular, in this lecture I will introduce initial insights from this study.
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Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
Liberals and progressives in the US and elsewhere often speak of defending or restoring liberal democracy. This implies that democracy can be sustained through a series of policy choices, and ignores the problem of the fraught relationship between democracy and capitalism. A historical look at capitalism and democracy, however, shows that the two have been compatible with one another only at certain moments, primarily during the long boom of the post 1945 period in the rich world. This configuration is now coming to an end due to deep structural transformations in the nature of capitalism in which political mechanisms are becoming increasingly decisive in determining the rate of return. The democratic politics must be articulated in relation to these profound changes in the structure of capitalism.
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Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
Women outnumber men on college campuses, graduate at higher rates, earn better grades, and have made significant in-roads in many occupations. For example, the majority of law, human and veterinary medicine, dentistry, and doctoral students are women, and women hold almost 52 percent of all management- and professional-level jobs. Simultaneously, however, scholars have documented puzzling stalls on the road to equality including slowing convergence of the gender pay gap and persistent vertical segregation by gender characterized by women’s overrepresentation at early career stages and women’s underrepresentation at later stages. These patterns raise important questions for gender and work scholars regarding inequality in such contexts. For example, what initially attracts women to these professions? Why do they leave? And, why have social scientists paid relatively less attention to these “leaky pipelines” compared to those in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics?