Colloquia
Sociology Department Colloquium Series
Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
MONDAYS, 2:00 - 3:30 PM
[unless otherwise noted]
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Hybrid: In Person, 402 Social Sciences Building & via Zoom
Racial disproportionality in school discipline is a major educational problem. Official data show that Black boys are disciplined at the highest rates of any group. Scholars suggest that the “criminal” Black male image shapes teachers’ views and treatment of their Black male students as early as preschool. Yet the interactional mechanisms of racialized discipline are unclear, particularly in early childhood. This study uses ethnography to understand first-grade teachers’ disciplinary interactions with Black and White boys. The findings uncover teachers’ racialized disciplinary approaches via differential surveillance of, differential engagement with, and differential responses to noncompliance from Black and White boys as a key mechanism that produces unequal disciplinary experiences in early childhood education. I discuss the implications of these findings for the racial socialization of Black and White boys.
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Hybrid: In Person, 402 Social Sciences Building & via Zoom
Over the past decade, recording technologies have enabled organized activists and ordinary residents to capture and circulate videos of police interventions. Existing research focuses primarily, however, on organized activists who rely on formal training programs to record police interventions. If formal programs train organized activists to capture police abuses on camera, how then do ordinary residents determine when they should record police behavior? Drawing on in-depth interviews with Black men who live in a Southside Chicago neighborhood, this study finds that residents’ recurrent police interactions enable them to interpret officers’ words and actions as symbols of procedural injustice, which, in subsequent exchanges, serve as signals to record events with cellphones—what I term “camera cues.” Camera cues facilitate situated conceptions of legal authority that trigger residents’ distrust of police. Equipped with cellphones, residents scrutinize officers’ outward displays and police–civilian interactions to challenge procedural injustice. While recording police behavior makes it possible at least occasionally to resist the dominance of legal authority, doing so often…
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Hybrid: In Person, 402 Social Sciences Building & via Zoom
Advancements in natural language processing have spurred the proliferation of studies examining gender stereotypes in online texts, including news and social media. Yet, while these studies suggest a reduction of gender bias in recent years, research indicates that progress toward gender equality has slowed or stalled in vital areas of social life, from hiring practices to household management. Textual measures of online stereotypes are at risk of underestimating the gender gap, which may be more salient in online images that visualize the demographics of people. In this talk, I show that online gender stereotypes are more prevalent in images than texts using a novel dataset comprising over one million images from Google, Wikipedia, and IMDb, mapped to over 3,400 distinct social categories, including occupations (e.g., “doctor”) as well as generic social roles (e.g., “friend”) and lifestyles (e.g., “vegan”); stereotypes in these images are then compared to stereotypes measured by word embedding models trained on billions of words from online texts. To characterize the empirical consequences of this finding, I use an online experiment to show that googling for visual rather than…
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Hybrid: In Person, 402 Social Sciences Building & via Zoom
The Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) killed nearly two million people. It produced a sprawling and unstable landscape of violence wherein victim and victimizer were often interchangeable roles. How did everyday resistance against the campaign look like? Focusing on the most vulnerable targets of discipline and punishment, I suggest that these persons were not merely objects of assault and abuse as research has assumed; they were also leading combatants against the violence of the campaign and prophets of its demise. I introduce the concept of subversive sociality to capture the creative, cooperative, and ethical dimensions of everyday resistance.
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Hybrid: In Person, 402 Social Sciences Building & via Zoom
Telling a true story about COVID-19 inequities is harder than you might think. Professor Riley will share examples from her research to demonstrate how different data leads to stories about COVID-19 inequities; and how the stories we tell about COVID-19 inequities, in turn, shape what we do about them.
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Hybrid: In Person, 402 Social Sciences Building & via Zoom
In this talk, I attend to the incredible proliferation of Black Italian movements—projects that address the Italian nation-state and the wider Black diaspora by disrupting the link between whiteness and Italianness and challenging the interlocking racist violences of Fortress Europe. What are the possibilities and limitations of these emergent mobilizations? What new formations are possible, and what older ones are resuscitated in this attempt to challenge the racial borders of Italy and of Europe? I am interested in opening up discussions of the so-called migrant “crisis” by focusing on a previously invisible generation of Black people who were born or raised in Europe but have been thrust into the same racist, xenophobic political climate as the immigrants and refugees who are arriving in Europe from across the Mediterranean Sea from the African continent. How are these Black Italians now actively remaking what it means to be Italian and to be European today? To answer these questions, I trace not only mobilizations for national citizenship, but also the more capacious, transnational Black diasporic possibilities that emerge when activists confront the ethical and political…
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Hybrid: In Person, 402 Social Sciences Building & via Zoom
In addition to profound health and mortality risks for people experiencing homelessness, the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted services and compounded pre-existing hardships. California’s signature programs responding to the pandemic, Project Roomkey and Homekey, substantially and quickly expanded capacity for sheltering and housing people experiencing homelessness. However, localities participated in the two programs very differently, making their impacts varied between regions. Drawing on a mixture of data from across the state, I examine how local implementation of these programs varied by the organizational structure of local homelessness systems.
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Hybrid: In Person, 402 Social Sciences Building & via Zoom
Third-trimester abortion is more expensive, difficult to obtain, and stigmatized than earlier abortion. In the post-Dobbs landscape, it is also likely to become more common as pregnant people face substantial barriers to obtaining abortion care promptly and are delayed into the third trimester. Advocating for a context-based—rather than individual reason-focused—framework, Dr. Kimport identifies who needs third-trimester abortions, their pathways to care, and what this means for the prospect of reproductive justice.
Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
Erik Olin Wright's last book was published at a time when socialist ideas had once again entered the mainstream of American politics. In many ways, his recommendations for anti-capitalist strategy built upon his work of the past four decades, but in others, they were a departure from it. In this talk I offer an appreciation and assessment of his argument. I suggest that while Wright's argument was characteristically bracing, it represented a turn away from class analysis and, in so doing, turned to a perspective that weakens the very anti-capitalism that he endorsed.
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Vivek Chibber teaches sociology at New York University. He is the author, most recently, of The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn (Harvard: 2022) and Confronting Capitalism: how World Works and how to Change it (Verso, 2022).
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Hybrid: in-person 402 Social Sciences Building and via Zoom
If it is by now clear that the police are militarized, the history, logics and operations of militarized policing remain elusive. This talk sheds some light through an historical sociology of militarized policing, beginning with the founding of the modern police in Britain in the nineteenth century and through the present in the United States. Modern policing as we know it was born in Britain and the United States as a “civil police,” meant as an alternative to the use of the military on home soil. But as this talk reveals, the so-called civil police from the beginning have not only adopted the forms and tactics of military forces, they have more specifically adopted imperial-military forms and tactics. Militarization must be recognized as a colonial boomerang, an effect of imperial feedback.