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: In 1996, Thomas LaVeist instructed social science health researchers to “continue to study race… but do a better job.” Reviews consistently suggests health studies control for race and ethnicity without defining, and often don’t account for racism. Dr. Pirtle will overview interventions of her empirical research, informed by critical race theory, that utilizes multidimensional measures of race and ethnicity, and structural measures of racism to explore health outcomes for Black, Latinx, and other populations of color. The talk demonstrates that using theoretically informed measures of race, ethnicity, and racism help us to do a better job refining our understanding of racialized health associations and clarifying mechanisms of racism in shaping health inequities.
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Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building & Via Zoom
In the Western, or more specifically, U.S.-dominated social sciences, people of color outside or within the West have historically been reduced to “research subjects,” and their role as knowledge producers has been marginalized. Precipitating such practices was the European and U.S. formal colonization of different parts of the world. In recent decades, there have been efforts to decolonize social science. Does greater “inclusion” of scholars of color within the existing knowledge production system achieve the decolonization goal? Or does the U.S. fundamentally reproduce the same hierarchical power relations within its informal empire through such “inclusion”? To address these questions, I will introduce the concept of “control by manipulation,” which is divided into “psychological warfare” and “behavioral modification,” and sketch a model of the way the U.S.
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Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
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Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
Abstract
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Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
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.
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Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
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.
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Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
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.
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Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
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.
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Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
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?
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Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
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.