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
Friday, April 8, 2-3:30pm in 402 Barrows
National Portraits: Racial Conceptualization and the Demographic Imaginary
Statistical “facts” about the demographic makeup of the nation often garner considerable public, media and political attention. In the United States, for example, Census Bureau projections that the “white” share of the national population will fall below 50 percent within 30 years have met with popular and intellectual concern, soul-searching, and at times, welcome. Far from objective data, however, these thought-provoking statistics are constructs that reflect prevailing beliefs about who “we”—and “they”—are. In the example above, the expectation that whites will no longer be a majority population in the U.S. depends on the view that Hispanic Americans are not white.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
On the Line: Racial Boundaries at Work in the New South
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Rebecca Jean Emigh
How States & Societies Count
Censuses in Italy, the United States, and the United Kingdom
Rebecca Jean Emigh will give a talk on a two-volume work co-authored with Dylan Riley and Patricia Ahmed. The volumes are entitled Antecedents of Censuses From Medieval to Nation States: How Societies and States Count (Volume 1) and Changes in Censuses from Imperialist to Welfare States: How Societies and States Count (Volume 2), Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. The authors explore a society-centered account of census taking in a broad historical and comparative perspective.
Wednesday March 30th, 4:00-5:30 pm
Social Science Matrix, Barrows Hall Room 832
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Randol Contreras: Monday, March 28, 2-3:30 in 402 Barrows Hall
There’s No Sunshine: Spatial Anguish in the Stigmatized Spaces of Compton and South Los Angeles.
Through field data collected in Compton and South Los Angeles, this paper develops the concept of spatial anguish to capture the shame and fear that residents feel because of their space’s stigma. In doing so, it reveals the intersection of race, class, gender, and space in the meanings of stigmatized residents. African Americans and Latina/os residents deal with their spatial anguish in two distinct ways: first, by trying to disassociate themselves from the stigma through the reinforcement of negative race and gender stereotypes; second, by using raced and gendered frames to negotiate their neighborhood safety.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Monday, March 14, 2:00-3:00pm in Barrows 402
Where Everybody May Not Know Your Name: The Importance of Elastic Ties
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Summoned: Identification and Religious Life in a Jewish Neighborhood
Based on ethnographic fieldwork, Summoned presents an account of the fabric of everyday life in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, and an attempt to think through the relationship among actors' identifications, the crystallization of their social worlds, and the micro-patterning of social interaction. I trace the ways in which both entrenched institutions and fleeting moments of interaction on the streets of LA's Melrose-La Brea neighborhood solidify actors' identifications and social worlds. Through this case, I argue that focusing on the rhythms and expectations of interaction allow sociologists to tie interactional analyses to wider social patterns and cut through some of the debate between theorizations of identity and identification.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
February 22, 2-3:30pm in 420 Barrows Hall
Combinatorial Politics: Civic Benevolence and the Making of the American Nation-State
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Monday, February 8, 2-3:30pm in 402 Barrows Hall
Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas
Professor Fizgerald will present his recently co-authored (with David Cook-Martín) book. Culling the Masses (Harvard University Press 2014) questions the widely held view that in the long run democracy and racism cannot coexist. The authors show that democracies were the first countries in the Americas to select immigrants by race, and undemocratic states the first to outlaw discrimination. Through analysis of legal records from twenty-two countries between 1790 and 2010, the authors present a history of the rise and fall of racial selection in the Western Hemisphere.Biography:
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Survey research in the digital age: The past, present, and very bright future
The digital age has transformed how researchers are able to study social behavior. Contrary to claims about the demise of the survey, in this talk, I will argue that the digital age actually increases the value of surveys. I will use the traditional total survey error framework to organize the landscape, and then I’ll highlight three broad areas for development: changes in who we ask, changes in how we ask, and changes in how we link surveys to other sources of data. The talk will conclude with some predictions for the future. This talk represents one chapter from a book I’m currently writing about social research in the digital age.