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
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.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Studying Abortion Providers: The Challenges and Gratifications of Public Sociology in a Contested Area
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Confounded Categories: What is Race in the Age of Genomics
This talk focuses on the relationship between the production of knowledge and socio-political understandings of group categories and racial inequalities. It examines how socio-political and institutional notions of race have been woven into the fabric of contemporary practices of knowledge production in new biomedical genomic and population research. We conduct an archaeology of the infrastructures used in genomic researchto unearth the assumptions built into its practices and tools. Since some of this use of cultural assumptions about racial differences in genomic medical research is unintentional, I hope that our work will help to promote change in these practices and to convince the world that any “evidence” for races as genetic categories is based on the introduction of social notions of race into the very production of scientific knowledge.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
PIERRE BOURDIEU AND THE INVENTION OF THE STATE
Special Sociology colloquium/Public sociology event
Monday 16 March 2015, 2-4pm
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Cashing In On Distress: The Expansion of Fringe Financial Institutions during the Great Recession
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112 Wurster Hall
This year, 2015, marks the 70th anniversary of the publication of the landmark text Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City by St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton. The book captured the dynamic life of Chicago’s Black community in the 1930s and 40s with inimitable detail and scope. Bringing their voluminous research up to date, I focus on the following questions: What and where is Black Metropolis in the early twenty-first century? What does life look like in Black Metropolis today? And, what is its future? I argue that Chicago remains an iconic and particularly extreme form of black residential settlement, and even in Chicago the cinch of the Black Belt has slowly but steadily loosened so that a shrinking proportion of Blacks live in Black neighborhoods. Outside of Chicago, we must look to the suburbs and to the South to find today’s thriving Black Metropolises.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Mandingo, Willie Horton, & the Pretty Boy: How black men’s bodies structure achievement in education, career, romance, and family
This report on preliminary analyses describes data collected during open-ended interviews with middle class black men on their achievement of education, career, and family outcomes. Data from black men who have earned 4-year college degrees or served for more than six years in military, police, or firefighter service occupations indicates at least four ways in which they invoked descriptions of their bodies to explain opportunities and constraints faced over the life course. Such men most often described the reactions others had to their size and complexion when explaining why and how they negotiated for or were constrained from involvement in particular educational, employment, and romantic activities. The report concludes with a discussion of the symbolic role played by racialized and gendered bodies in the reproduction of multiple social hierarchies.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Still Playing by the Rules: Arab-Jewish Relations in Israel