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: As housing unaffordability intensifies in the United States, rent regulation has reemerged as a contentious policy response. A large empirical literature documents its effects on housing supply and efficiency, yet we know remarkably little about its long-term consequences for the families and children it is intended to protect. This paper examines the long-term effects of childhood exposure to World War II-era federal rent control, one of the largest rental market interventions in U.S. history. I introduce a newly digitized dataset of Federal Register records measuring the introduction and withdrawal of rent controls across municipalities, which I link to restricted-use IRS tax records from 1969 to 1994 and the 1940 and 2000 Decennial Censuses.
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Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
Abstract: Across the world, women are reconsidering their reproductive futures. Amid soaring inequalities, some have given up on having children, while others are having fewer than they once imagined or changing when and how they build their families. Environmental risk, often taking the form of climate change, contamination, and ecological disasters, sits at the center of those concerns. Public debate tends to frame these concerns as anxiety about a distant, climate-altered future. Yet for many communities, environmental harm is already here, in the water they use. This talk asks how water pollution shapes women’s reproductive decision-making and, more broadly, who does the work of managing environmental risk when no institution takes responsibility for it.
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Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
Why do some policies survive state dismantling while others do not? This talk conceptualizes a novel source of policy survival: legal dispersion, the spreading of the rules that define state financial flows across different legal codes and jurisdictions. In doing so, it brings the conceptual apparatus of legal sociology, developed in studies of private assets, to political-sociological questions of state finances and democratic backsliding. Drawing on the case of President Bolsonaro’s attack on state-led decarbonization in Brazil, it shows how variation in legal dispersion accounts for divergent outcomes. First, using extensive archival work and in-depth interviews, it traces how and why bureaucrats, movements, and lawyers chose different legal designs for the three main climate finance instruments between 1985 and 2018. Second, using original longitudinal data on state finances, it shows that resource flows survived Bolsonaro’s attempts at dismantling to the extent that their designs were dispersed across national codes and transnational jurisdictions. This solution to the problem of persistence, however, comes with a trade-off.
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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