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
Racial Inequality in Family Income: A Demographic Approach
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Land, Labor Mobility, and Racial Inequality in Convict Leasing in the Postbellum U.S. South
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
“Consecration and Creativity: Insights from the Art World”
Using the art world in early twentieth–century Paris as a backdrop, the talk explores how social and economic contexts shape individual achievements, both in terms of success and creativity. It first introduces a structural approach to consecration, and demonstrates how consecration influenced the economic worth of artists over and above other social processes of valuation. In a second move, the talk investigates how the structural transformations of the art market induced a change in the social embeddedness of creativity. Ultimately, the case and approach help to reflect anew about the questions of what makes us valuable or not, and creative or not.
Ho-fung Hung: HEGEMONIC TRANSITION? "America's Decline" and "China's Rise" in Historical Perspective
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
HEGEMONIC TRANSITION? "AMERICA'S DECLINE" AND "CHINA'S RISE" IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
The US has been projected by many as a declining global hegemon since the 1970s. Despite such decline, US military supremacy and its capability in defining the global economic orthodoxy remained formidable. This staying power of the US stems in large part from the “dollar standard” in the world economy. The state-led and export-oriented development of China has been a significant supporter of the dollar standard in the last decade, despite the widespread expectation that China’s rise could end the US-centered global order. This US-China collusion brings economic imbalances, social crises and political dilemmas within China as much as in the US. Whether China could overcome the vested interests and socio-political risks to shift to a more egalitarian and household-consumption-driven pattern of development will be crucial in shaping the future of the global dollar standard, and hence the future of US global power.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
PUBLIC SOCIOLOGY FORUM, 7-9p.m., November 6, Barrows 402.
Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time
Ira Katznelson, Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History at Columbia University will present his new and magisterial book, Fear Itself, with responses from Berkeley’s sociology faculty – Dylan Riley, Loïc Wacquant and Margaret Weir
Fear Itself has caused a stir in both academic circles and public media for its recasting of the meaning and legacy of the New Deal and how we can (re)understand the present. For Katznelson US liberal democracy, with all its warts, was sustained only through the genius of three compromises: with foreign dictatorships, with racism, and with Cold War militarism. At the heart of these compromises lies the enduring (im)balance between the US’s two faces: procedural or formal democracy and a missionary or garrison state.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Classification Situations: Life Chances in the Neoliberal Era
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
EXPERIENCING TEACHING: A PANEL DISCUSSION
Irene Bloemraad, Tom Gold and Sandra Smith, University of California, Berkeley.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
THE SENSE OF STORIES: THE SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL MEANING OF STORY-TELLING
Christien Brinkgreve with an introduction by Arlie Hochschild
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
CAN SCIENCE MAKE YOU GOOD?
The distinction between expertise and virtue is a modern cultural institution. Knowing what is and knowing what ought to be done are seen as quite different capacities, and among the consequences flowing from this difference is that technical experts are thought to be no better placed than anyone else to offer moral guidance, even when they possess uniquely deep knowledge of possible outcomes of their technical work. Science just does not make its practitioners virtuous or wise or philosopher-kings.
This talk offers a historical sketch of how these sensibilities came about, roughly from the second part of the nineteenth century, and it discusses some contemporary sociological consequences of the is/ought distinction.