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
"Culture and Institutional Innovation: Missionaries versus NGOs in Sub-Saharan Africa "
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Karen Barkey, Columbia University
Tue. April 29, 2014, 2:00-3:30pm, 402 Barrows Hall
Choreographies of Sharing: Sacred Sites in Ottoman and Contemporary Turkey
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Melissa Wilde, University of Pennsylvania
Fri. April 25, 2014, 10:30am-12:00pm, 402 Barrows Hall
Birth of the Culture Wars: How Race Divided American Religion
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Fictive Kinship: Family Reunification and the Meaning of Race and Nation in American Immigration
Today, roughly 70 percent of all visas for legal immigration are reserved for family members of permanent residents or American citizens. Family reunification – policies that seek to preserve family unity during or following migration – is a central pillar of current immigration law and regularly lauded as a modern, liberal political achievement. However, family reunification has existed in some form in American immigration policy since at least the mid-nineteenth century and has been an important feature in passage of exclusionary as well as expansive immigration policy. Catherine Lee delves into the history of family reunification to examine how and why our conceptions of family have shaped immigration control, the meaning of race, and the way we see ourselves as a nation. Professor Lee also explores how ideas about family unity may shape political action for changing our current immigration policy.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Capitalism as a World-System: Analysis and Practice
To close our year-long colloquium series we welcome Immanuel Wallerstein. For 30 years he was Director of theFernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations at the State University of New York, Binghamton. He is now Senior Research Scholar at Yale University.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
The Meaning of Bourdieu: his reception in different countries
Pierre Bourdieu is the most important sociologist of the second half of the 20th Century. His work has been translated in many countries since the 1970s, which is an indicator of his international reputation or symbolic capital, confirmed by the very high number of citations of his work. This worldwide circulation can be mapped in time and in space through a comparison of the rhythm and order of translation of his books in different languages and countries. The paper will then focus more specifically on the reception of Bourdieu’s work in the United States, and on the impact of Distinction, which promoted him from the position of a recognized specialist in different areas to that of a social theorist. Finally, it will raise the question of the effects of the international reception on Bourdieu’s own approach, from his growing interest in comparison to his engagement against neoliberalism, which turned him into a “global intellectual”. More generally, the paper addresses the issue of the construction of an international reputation in the social science.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Labor Standards and the Reorganization of Work: Gaps in Data and Research
A common but understudied argumentis that the reorganization of work has contributed to the deterioration of labor standards in the US over the past four decades. Yet existing aggregate data do not show a strong, unambiguous increase in key measures of nonstandard work arrangements such as temp jobs, part-time work and independent contracting; investigating a link to trends in distributional wage outcomes is therefore premature. Instead, this paper identifies data gaps and research questions that need to be answered, in order to better understand trends in workplace restructuring during the era of growing wage inequality.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Race and Razza: Concepts of Difference in the United States and Italy
Scholars of racism in Western Europe often contend that Europeans conceive of group differences in cultural terms whereas Americans adhere to more biological notions of difference. Yet this comparative claim is rarely subjected to empirical inquiry. Our project focuses on the case of Italy in order to systematically compare beliefs about the nature of difference on both sides of the Atlantic. In-depth interviews conducted with 75 college students in Milan, Bologna, and Naples, in conjunction with interviews of over 50 undergraduates in the northeastern U.S., suggest that there is more similarity in their concepts of group difference than scholars have expected. Biology figures in Italians' perceptions of immigrants, despite powerful discourse about color-blindness, and culture cohabits with physical difference in American notions of race despite rhetoric that grounds race in genetics.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
The early origins of disadvantage: Long-lasting consequences of prenatal stress
Growing evidence suggests that the prenatal period is highly sensitive to the environment and that exposures before birth can have long-lasting consequences on individual development and wellbeing. However, capturing the causal effect of prenatal exposures is difficult because of unobserved selectivity.
Using natural experiments in different national settings, I study the effect of environmental stressors during the prenatal period on health, developmental and educational outcomes early in the life-cycle. An important focus of the analysis is how the interaction between early exposures and family socioeconomic resources creates “trajectories of disadvantage”. Based on the evidence, I argue for the need to incorporate early exposures to the understanding of intergenerational inequality.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Ethnographies of finance has engaged broadly with the social dynamic of financialization, as well as the importance and centrality of financial markets, institutions, values, practices, in the global social economy and everyday life. Given the pervasive influence of finance in our world, coupled with the production of highly specialized knowledge among financial actors and networks, ethnographies of finance has made important contributions toward a deeper understanding of the products, practices, ideologies, and socio-economic consequences of finance and financialization. In particular, what anthropology has brought to the study of finance are its fine-grained ehtnographic methods of participant observation, long-term immersion, and engagement with natives’ points of view, practices, and everyday lives. These approaches are especially useful given that finance as an ethnographic site is not only characterized by inaccessibility to outsiders, specialized knowledge, and continual change and innovation, but is also framed by our larger culture as both mystifying and a-cultural.