Colloquia

Sociology Department Colloquium Series
Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
MONDAYS, 2:00 - 3:30 PM
[unless otherwise noted]

Peter Bearman talk on 2/21

February 21, 2017 - 3:30 pm - February 21, 2017 - 5:00 pm

Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall

Peter Bearman Columbia University Tuesday 2/21 3:30-5:00pm 420 Barrows Hall The neural foundations/signatures of affective and instrumental social relations and the emergence of dyadic reciprocity and identity in human groups.

Jens Beckert. Imagined Futures and Capitalist Dynamics

February 13, 2017 - 2:00 pm - February 13, 2017 - 3:30 pm

Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall

Imagined Futures and Capitalist Dynamics In a capitalist system, consumers, investors, and corporations orient their activities toward a future that contains opportunities and risks. How do actors assess the future if this future is open and uncertain? Jens Beckert adds a new chapter to the theory of capitalism by demonstrating how fictional expectations drive modern economies—or throw them into crisis when the imagined futures fail to materialize. Collectively held images of how the future will unfold are critical because they free economic actors from paralyzing doubt, enabling them to commit resources and coordinate decisions even if those expectations prove inaccurate. Since they are not confined to empirical reality, fictional expectations are a source of creativity in the economy. In the talk Beckert will develop the notion of fictional expectations and relate it to the operation of investments, innovation and consumption. The talk is based on Beckert’s new book “Imagined Futures. Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics” (HUP 2016).

Justin Grimmer. Using Text as Data Methods to Discover, Measure, and Explain

February 6, 2017 - 2:00 pm - February 6, 2017 - 3:30 pm

Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall

Using Text as Data Methods to Discover, Measure, and Explain Text as data methods are increasingly used in the social sciences to explore large scale collections of text. This talk draws on my recent papers to show the distinct social science tasks that text as data methods can accomplish and provides a framework for evaluating those methods. Using an example from the study of Congressional communication I show how text as data methods can help us to understand the connection between elected officials and constituents. And an example survey experiment shows how text can be used to understand constituents' decisions in a democracy.

Christopher Newfield. The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them. With Kim Voss, Henry Brady, and Prudence Carter

February 1, 2017 - 5:00 pm - February 1, 2017 - 7:30 pm

Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall

BERKELEY SOCIOLOGY FORUM & THE BERKELEY FACULTY ASSOCIATION Wednesday, February 1, 2017, 5-7.30p.m., 402 Barrows Hall The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them Christopher Newfieldis Professor of Literature and American Studies and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He will present his new book, The Great Mistake, with responses from Professors Kim Voss, Henry Brady and Prudence Carter.

Lauren Edelman. EEO Law, Courts, and the Production of Symbolic Civil Rights

January 30, 2017 - 2:00 pm - January 30, 2017 - 3:30 pm

Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall

EEO Law, Courts, and the Production of Symbolic Civil Rights In Working Law: Courts, Corporations, and Symbolic Civil Rights (Chicago 2016), Lauren Edelman argues that we have become a symbolic civil rights society in which symbols of equal opportunity and diversity substitute have become accepted measures of compliance, influencing the ways in which lawyers, regulators, and even judges understand civil rights law. This talk highlights three of the trends discussed in the book: the erosion of the progressive vision in the courts, the managerialization of law within organizations, and judicial deference to symbolic forms of organizational compliance.

Sean Reardon. 200 million test scores and what do we know? Income, race, and the geography of educational opportunity in the U.S.

January 23, 2017 - 2:00 pm - January 23, 2017 - 3:30 pm

Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall

200 million test scores and what do we know? Income, race, and the geography of educational opportunity in the U.S. We test students a great deal in the United States. In grades three through eight alone, U.S. students take roughly 50 million standardized state accountability tests each year. Their scores on these tests, aggregated within geographic school districts and student subgroups, provide a useful proxy measure of the sum total of educational opportunities available to children in different communities and groups. In this talk, I will describe the construction and use of a population-level data set (the Stanford Education Data Archive) based on over 200 million test scores from 2009-2013. Using these data, I will describe the patterns and correlates of academic performance and racial/ethnic achievement gaps at an unprecedented level of detail, with a particular focus on the role of socioeconomic context and segregation patterns in shaping opportunity. These data reveal a great deal about patterns of educational opportunity in the United States.