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
    Hackathons and the Making of Entrepreneurial Citizenship This talk focuses on how valorized forms of work become models of citizenship. Today, the halls of TED and Davos reverberate with optimism that hacking, brainstorming, and crowdsourcing can transform citizenship, development, and education alike. I will examine these claims ethnographically and historically with an eye towards the kinds of social orders these practices rely on and produce. I focuses on a hackathon, one emblematic site of social practice where techniques and work processes from information technology production become ways of remaking culture. Hackathons sometimes produce technologies; they always, however, produce subjects. This paper argues that the hackathon rehearses an entrepreneurial citizenship celebrated in transnational cultures that orient towards Silicon Valley for models of social change. Such optimistic, high-velocity practice aligns, in India, with middle-class politics that favor quick and forceful action with socially similar collaborators over the contestations of mass democracy or the slow construction of coalition across difference.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
  2:00-3:30pm, ​Monday, September 28 in Barrows 402 Sociology in the age of social media The World Wide Web is about four graduate student completion cycles old; blogging as a self-conscious activity is about three cycles old; widespread Facebook and Twitter use, about one and a half cycles old. What sort of public face has Sociology had during each of these phases of social media use? And where is it going to go in the future? I informally review developments and find that while Sociologists have been relatively late to each party, there are good reasons for optimism. I argue that Sociologists generally (a) overestimate the need for complexity in public interventions, as well as the public’s tolerance for High Seriousness, and (b) underestimate the strong public demand for what might seem—from a “professional” point of view—quite straightforward social-scientific concepts, data, or knowledge generally.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
  What is to be Sustained? Exploring the Promises and Pitfalls of Urban Sustainability
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
  Neoliberal Abortion One of the more puzzling political shifts in recent years is the movement of conservative thought and political action in the direction of opposition to contraception and abortion.  Until recently, the Republican Party was the standard-bearer for expansion of these rights (President George H.W. Bush was such an enthusiastic supporter of contraception as a Congressman that he was known as “Rubbers” Bush.)  The presentation, a chapter from a forthcoming book, unpacks this political sea change as a way of exploring changes in the larger political and social culture of American society. ______________________________________________________________________________________
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
THE STRANGE CAREER OF RACISM IN POST-RACIAL TIMES: Observations on Race in America and in the Academy The “end of racism” has been advertised for years, yet, like Freddy Krugger, racism refuses to die. In this talk, I discuss how racism operates in post-racial America. To do so, I address four things. First, I will suggest that we cannot examine “Freddy” adequately because we keep thinking he is just about hate and prejudice. Second, I will discuss the structure and culture of racism in post-racial times by referencing my work on the “new racism” and “color-blind racism.” Third, I will discuss how race matters in the academy particularly in our own sociological houses.  Lastly, I will offer some suggestions on what is to be done if we wish to end racial domination once and for all in the country and in the academy.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
  Network Effects on Behavior: How Do Mechanisms Matter? Filiz Garip (with Paul DiMaggio) Social scientists have long established that individuals’ behaviors are influenced by those of their network peers in many social domains. Recent work has also shown such network effects can exacerbate inequality in a behavior if networks are homophilous with respect to attributes that influence the adoption of that behavior. To extend this work, we first identify six distinct mechanisms that can underlie network effects: (i) simple contagion, (ii) social facilitation, (iiii) social observation, (iv) normative influence with or (v) without consensus, and (vi) network externalities. We then use an agent-based model to examine differences mechanisms make in (i) the level of overall adoption, and (ii) the level of intergroup inequality under different scenarios of network homophily.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
  The Contentious Public Sphere in China: Law, Media, and the Dilemma of Authoritarian Rule Ya-Wen Lei
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
  Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control In this project, we argue that institutions of criminal justice have become an important source of political socialization, in which the lessons that are imprinted are antagonistic to democratic participation and inspire negative orientations toward government. To test this argument, we conduct the first systematic empirical exploration of how criminal justice involvement shapes the citizenship, political voice and racial attitudes of a growing swath of Americans. We find that custodial involvement carries with it a substantial civic penalty that is not explained by criminal propensity or socioeconomic differences alone. Our research suggests that the historical growth of the criminal justice sector has profound consequences for the political representation of historically marginalized groups and for the health of American democracy.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
  Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Post-War America In Deeply Divided, McAdam and Kloos depart from established explanations of the conservative turn in the United States and trace the roots of political polarization and economic inequality back to the shifting racial geography of American politics in the 1960s. Angered by Lyndon Johnson's more aggressive embrace of civil rights reform in 1964, Southern Dixiecrats abandoned the Democrats for the first time in history, setting in motion a sustained regional realignment that would, in time, serve as the electoral foundation for a resurgent and increasingly more conservative Republican Party.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
The Power of Transparency: Inequality and Information Sharing in the Modern Workplace   Does the dissemination of workplace information shift power dynamics within workplaces, and if so, how?  In this project I first provide updated analyses of how widespread information sharing is in the contemporary U.S., and outline strategies for uncovering whether or not information sharing affects pay.  Second, I provide evidence that the spread of organizational financial information increases wages in Great Britain.  I argue that disclosure is a key resource that reduces information asymmetries, thereby providing legitimacy to workers’ claims in wage bargaining.  My focus on managerial transparency and its effects on worker earnings reveals a largely-ignored characteristic of modern workplaces that has implications for contemporary trends in inequality and wage stagnation in the liberal market economies.