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
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.
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Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
In recent decades, the rising trend of populism threatens to undermine democracy globally. Existing
scholarship has analyzed how macro structural forces and cultural performative factors contribute to
populist rhetoric and mobilizations. However, relatively little research has been devoted to documenting
or theorizing counter-populism. This talk will explore the question: how does counter-populist political
performance gain resonance with the public? I will engage the literatures of populism, political
performance, and hope, and discuss a case study of the 2021 COVID outbreak in Taiwan. Drawing on a
qualitative analysis of 502 newspaper articles, preliminary findings suggest that the Taiwanese
government’s counter-populist efforts succeeded through transforming an emotive context of anger
into one featuring hope – a process I term “emotive transformation.” I will report three key mechanisms
facilitating this process, including the enactment of key elements of hope, timely inclusion of
nonpartisan participants, and strong collective effervescence. Meanwhile, this analysis acknowledges
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Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
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Hybrid: In Person, 402 Social Sciences Building & via Zoom
Incidents of state violence and activism against that violence illustrate the continuing significance of race and the persistence of white supremacy in France, the United States, and worldwide. Based on past and current ethnographic research and interviews with ethnic minorities in the Parisian metropolitan region, this talk argues that, despite France’s colorblind and Republican ethos, France’s “visible minorities” function under a “suspect citizenship” in which their full societal belonging is never granted. I focus on the growing problem of state violence against ethnic minorities which reveals how France is creating a “bright boundary” (Alba 2005) between whites and non-whites, furthering disparate outcomes based on race and ethnic origin. By considering the multifaceted dimensions of citizenship and belonging in France, I demonstrate the limitations of full societal inclusion for France’s non-white denizens and how French Republicanism continues to mark, rather than erase, racial and ethnic distinctions.
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Hybrid: The Graduate Hotel, California Room & via Zoom
This talk illustrates how, in the context of consumer medicine, physicians convince patients to invest in particular medical treatments by weighing risks with them, reframing uncertain processes as calculable gambles. I delve into the case of twins as a by-product of fertility treatment, which transitioned from a welcome outcome to a problematic one for fertility professionals, while remaining a desirable birth outcome for many patients. From observing hundreds of patient-provider consults at three fertility clinics in New York State that catered to distinct patient populations, as well as conducting over a hundred in-depth interviews with patients and medical providers, I argue that providers reframe the prospect of having twins to patients by communicating with them not only about the associated health risks, but also those related to temporal, financial, and emotional constraints, and show how these negotiations diverge depending clinics' organizational imperatives, particularly the class of patients they are set up to serve.
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Hybrid: The Graduate Hotel, California Room & via Zoom
Sociological studies stress how state legibility serves as a form of population control. Often overlooked is how states differ in their will to control, and how this variation shapes legibility projects. This research proposes a three-dimensional analytical framework to study legibility from a comparative perspective that seeks to account for this variation. I illustrate the usefulness of this framework through an in-depth analysis of how Brazil and Mexico rendered poor individuals visible in order to implement conditional cash transfer programs (or CCTs). In the mid-1990s, these two states implemented the same policy, facing very similar challenges; yet, they adopted different solutions for governing their respective CCT programs and making poor families visible. Drawing on the analysis of approximately 15,000 pages of official documents, 125 in-depth interviews with bureaucratic and political elites, and 18 months of fieldwork in Brazil and Mexico, this article reveals the political and governance effects of distinct methods of seeing like a state. Specifically, I show that the differences and consequences of legibility projects depended on the politics of legitimation of each…