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: Why did political elites contest colonialism through a revolutionary path in Vietnam compared to an accommodationist one in Senegal? Drawing on original archival research in Vietnam, Senegal, and France, I examine how global economic shifts granted local economic intermediaries leverage as brokers between society, market, and state. This leverage generated uncertainty regarding political elites’ standing vis-à-vis the state to shape early challenges to colonialism.
Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
Abstract: Data, the raw material of the digital economy, are often described as exhaust from users’ behavior, left behind as they click, watch, and buy online. This talk goes behind the screen to show how platform data are produced, in part, through gendered labor. Drawing on fifteen months of ethnography in China’s live commerce industry, including my own work as a livestreaming assistant inside agencies that recruit, train, and manage streamers, I trace the labor process behind audience engagement. In the studios, I watched managers engineer femininities and masculinities in real time: metrics guide streamers’ performances, those performances elicit viewers’ clicks, comments, and purchases, and those responses are recorded as data. Setting this fieldwork against archival research on earlier generations of women’s factory and service work, I show what endures and what intensifies. Firms have long organized gender into work and used performance records to direct labor. What changes is the speed, granularity, and scale of feedback: audience responses are recorded and fed back into the labor process while the performance is still unfolding.
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Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
Abstract:
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Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
Abstract: Classificatory infrastructures underpin platform business models. Research on quantification shows how common measures and impersonal procedures can help coordinate actors with divergent commitments. Why, then, did iLabor’s culture of data-driven development fail to consolidate the work on its classificatory infrastructure?
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Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
Abstract: The field of law largely dismisses wrongful convictions as rare exceptions in an otherwise well-oiled criminal justice machine. Wrongful convictions are either dismissed as a product of incompetence or corruption rather than a product of police technique that is institutionalized. This research offers a novel intervention in the field of wrongful convictions by examining how racial stigma embeds in the seemingly race-blind, fact-finding stage of criminal investigations. Using historical ethnography, archives, legal filings and interviews, this study shows how wrongful conviction is a product of police technique that is institutionalized like a shadow system of justice.
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Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
Engaging for IMPACT: Evaluating Innovations in Democratic Reform:
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Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building