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
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.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Worker Identities in a New Era of Immigration
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
A Fugitive Adolescence: Growing Up Under The US Crime War
Forty years in, the War on Crime and Drugs has done almost nothing to prevent drugs from being sold or used, but it has nonetheless created a little-known surveillance state in America’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods. Goffman spent six years living in one such neighborhood in Philadelphia; her book On the Run recounts young men and women coming of age as they attend court dates and parole meetings, survive interrogations and beatings, and dip and dodge the police.
Alice Goffman is an urban ethnographer who grew up in Philadelphia. She attended graduate school at Princeton and now teaches in the sociology department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Consent and Contestation: A Mini-Symposium on Gramsci's Contemporary Relevance
with
Michael Burawoy, Department of Sociology
Gillian Hart, Department of Geography
Dylan Riley, Department of Sociology
Cihan Tugal, Department of Sociology
This panel brings together four leading scholars of Gramsci who have used his writings to understand everything from the rise of fascism in interwar Europe, the end of apartheid in South Africa and the ANC's subsequent neoliberal turn, to Turkey's passive revolution, and the production of consent in the American factory. In this mini-symposium, these scholars will discuss whether and how Gramsci's concepts of hegemony and counterhegemony are relevant for thinking about (and trying to change) the world today.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
The Specter of Global China: Raw Encounters in the African Sub-continent
Drawing on data collected through comparative ethnographic fieldwork on Chinese investments in Zambia in the past five years, this talk addresses the questions: What is the peculiarity of Chinese capital? What are the impacts of Chinese investments on African development? Rejecting both the Western rhetoric of “Chinese colonialism” and the Chinese self-justification of “south-south cooperation”, I examine the logic of accumulation, production regime and managerial ethos of Chinese state capital by comparing Chinese and non-Chinese mines on the Zambian Copperbelt.
Ching Kwan Lee is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. A native of Hong Kong, she obtained her PhD in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley and has previously taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Currently, she is a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Democracy in Motion: Participatory Blueprints and the New Spirit of Governance.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Navigating Difference within Sociological Fields
Race, Class, and Gender have historically been studied as subfields within sociology. However, these social constructs have implications across all sociological fields. In this panel discussion, Cristina Mora, Jenna Johnson-Hanks, and Neil Fligstein share their own experiences addressing race, class, and gender in their subfields of organizations, family, and economic sociology. This panel will be moderated by Raka Ray.