Colloquia

Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology is often described as a “critical sociology,” but there are two distinct modes of critique present in his work. At times he engages in what I call the realist mode of critique, which is premised on the idea that our naïve experience of the social world dissimulates real relations of domination, which critique then reveals. At other times, Bourdieu engages in what I call the historicist mode of critique, which denaturalizes the doxic experience of the social order by demonstrating its arbitrary character. Whereas realist critique claims the social world really is other than it appears, historicist critique suggests that it could be otherwise. Though these two modes of critique co-exist with some tension in Bourdieu’s work, I argue that this tension is not unique to Bourdieu, but rather something that has structured interpretive debates in other critical social scientific traditions, such as the Polanyian and Marxist literatures. This suggests a general ambiguity in what it means to do critical social science.

Abstract

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Women were required by law to take their husband’s surnames upon marriage until the 1970s, and the practice is still dominant in American society. This practice provides a unique opportunity to evaluate the persistence of gendered norms and expectations beyond people’s stated attitudes. The marital exchange/bargaining approaches predicts that married women will be more likely to take their husband’s surnames if they have lower status than their husbands. In contrast. In contrast, the doing gender approach predicts that wives will be more likely to take their husbands’ names when their status surpasses their husbands’, to compensate for their gender deviance. Using natality data with complete surname information between 2010 and 2021, we find strong support for the doing gender approach. Compared to couples with similar educational and racial status, women are more likely to take their husbands’ names when they have lower and higher status than their husbands. The likelihood of taking their husbands’ names increases with the status disparity between spouses.

In recent decades, the rising trend of populism threatens to undermine democracy globally. Existing scholarship has analyzed how macro structural forces and cultural performative factors contribute to populist rhetoric and mobilizations. However, relatively little research has been devoted to documenting or theorizing counter-populism. This talk will explore the question: how does counter-populist political performance gain resonance with the public? I will engage the literatures of populism, political performance, and hope, and discuss a case study of the 2021 COVID outbreak in Taiwan. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of 502 newspaper articles, preliminary findings suggest that the Taiwanese government’s counter-populist efforts succeeded through transforming an emotive context of anger into one featuring hope – a process I term “emotive transformation.” I will report three key mechanisms facilitating this process, including the enactment of key elements of hope, timely inclusion of nonpartisan participants, and strong collective effervescence. Meanwhile, this analysis acknowledges