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 Barrows Hall
  February 26 Barrows Hall 820 2-4pm Co-sponsored by the Social Science Matrix Kim Lane Scheppele, Princeton University Autocratic Legalism (with discussions by Dylan Riley and Jason Wittenberg)
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
  “A Nowadays Disease"? Aging, Gendered Sexuality and HIV/AIDS in a rural South African community
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
  The Great Experiment and the Great Reckoning: Decarceration and the Legal Reform of Mass Incarceration
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
  “I, too, Am Hungry”: Structural Exclusion at an Elite University Through major financial aid initiatives, colleges have increased access for undergraduates from disadvantaged backgrounds. While previous investigations of undergraduate life emphasize how differences in cultural capital shape students’ integration into college, I examine structural exclusion—how specific operational features of the college marginalize lower-income undergraduates—to highlight the university’s direct role in shaping social interactions and undergraduates’ sense of belonging. I draw on interviews with 103 undergraduates, two years of ethnographic observations, and data from administrative and online sources to show how lower-income undergraduates identify these policies as intentional and abrupt tears in the fabric of campus life that mark them as different for being poor. I interrogate the social and personal costs of exclusion and discuss implications for undergraduates’ opportunities and social well-being. 
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
  co-sponsored with the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Working Group (AFOG) Karen Levy Data Driven: Truckers and The New Workplace Surveillance This talk examines how electronic monitoring systems in the U.S. trucking industry are used to compel truckers’ compliance with legal and organizational rules. For decades, truckers have kept track of their work time using easily falsified paper logbooks, and performed their work without too much regard for legal worktime limits. But new regulations will require truckers’ time to be monitored by digital systems, hard-wired into the trucks themselves, which remove much of the flexibility on which truckers have historically relied.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Poverty, Place, and Time Constraints
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
  Counting Women Beyond Survival:  Post-Abortion Care and Global Reproductive Governance in Senegal.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
  Protectors of Pluralism: Christian Minorities and the Rescue of Jews during the Holocaust
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
  Between Blood and Sex: The Contradictory Impact of Transnational AIDS Institutions on State Repression in China, 1989-2013 Do external interventions matter? Existing research has focused on the extent to which transnational efforts compel recalcitrant governments to reduce levels of domestic repression, but few have considered how such interventions might also provoke new forms of repression. Using a longitudinal study of repression against AIDS activism in China between 1989 and 2013, I will propose that transnational institutions’ provision of material resources and reshaping of organizational rules can transform a domestic repressive apparatus in specific policy areas. The intervention of transnational AIDS institutions in China not only constrained traditional violent coercion, but also generated new forms of “diplomatic repression” that inadvertently contributed to expanded mobilization for urban gay men but demobilization for others. I will conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for understanding changes in political inequality through transnational processes.    
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
  Innovation for a Cure: Social Learning in the National Cancer Institute’s Vaccine Programs