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
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
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Wage Stagnation and Buyer Power: How Buyer-Supplier Relations Affect U.S. Workers’ Wages, 1978-2014
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
A Material Political Economy: The High-Frequency Trading of US Shares
Ultrafast, automated ‘high-frequency trading’ or HFT now makes up around half of all US share trading. Drawing upon interviews with 54 high-frequency traders, MacKenzie’s talk will examine the ‘signals’ (patterns of data) that shape how HFT algorithms interact. He will argue that despite the high-technology glamour of autonomous, algorithmic economic agents, their behaviour is shaped by ‘political economy’ struggles — some with their origins in the 1970s — about how shares and other financial instruments should be traded.
The underlying theoretical goal is to integrate the materialism of actor-network theory with the emphasis on meso-level conflict in field-theoretic economic sociology. The talk, however, will be quite concrete. MacKenzie will, for example, explain the effect of rain on patterns of US stock prices, and reveal the mundane feature of the US political system that underpins the HFT signal (‘futures lead’) on which he will focus.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
“Trading Land for Welfare”: Inequality and Citizenship Reform in Rural China
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Lifestyle algorithms: wearable technology as self-regulation
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Understanding Sexual Violence on a College Campus
The Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation (SHIFT) is one of the most comprehensive studies of sexual violence within a community. Taking two years, and drawing upon surveys, diaries, focus groups, interviews, and embedded ethnography, SHIFT is an attempt to systematically and scientifically understand sexual violence, and proposes community transformations that can help address and reduce it. In this talk Shamus Khan draws upon the SHIFT project to think through how we might better make sense of sexual violence, and what we might do to create healthier campus communities.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Made to Know: Science as the Social Production of Collective Intelligence
Institutionalized social learning can lead to cumulative cultural evolution and collective intelligence. Science is perhaps the signature example of this distinctly human strategy. In this talk, I develop a view of science as the social production of collective intelligence. Using data from millions of scientific papers, I illustrate how scientists’ research choices are shaped by the tension between tradition and innovation. I then show how their dispositions lead to more (and less) efficient collective discovery. To clarify our understanding of scientific institutions, I describe a simple formal model of scientific problem choice and use it to show that taken-for-granted features of scientific institutions (like the publication of partial results) can have unexpected collective consequences. I draw together these results using ideas from computational learning theory to suggest how scientists’ strategies, though objectively adapted to social goals and human limitations, nonetheless support robust collective learning about the natural world.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
NOTE LOCATION CHANGE: Matrix, 8th floor of Barrows Hall