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: The Graduate Hotel, California Room & via Zoom
Though social networks have long been theorized as a critical resource that may attenuate the negative impact of residential segregation on health, few empirical studies have explored this possibility. Using an egocentric network approach, this study examines social network processes linking residential segregation to health and health disparities among Black and White Americans. Specifically, drawing on U.S. census data and individual-level survey data from the Person-to-Person Health Interview Study, I ask: (1) To what extent does residential segregation contribute to Black-White disparities in physical and mental health? (2) Do characteristics of social networks moderate the association between residential segregation and health? While I find residential segregation to have no association with physical and mental health for White Americans, residential segregation is associated with worse physical health but better mental health for Black Americans; however, these relationships are moderated by network factors. That is, the adverse association between residential segregation and physical health is substantially attenuated among Black Americans who are embedded in networks with…
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Hybrid: In Person, 402 Social Sciences Building & via Zoom
There seems to have been a rapid change in recent years in how people talk and think about social justice issues. But how dramatic or broad has the purported shift actually been? When did it start? How durable are current trends likely to be? Who is driving the change? Is this a genuinely novel historical moment? Or are there relevant precedents that can provide us analytical leverage into what’s happening today? Drawing from his forthcoming book, al-Gharbi will argue that there has indeed been a significant shift in norms and discourse around ‘identity’ issues over the last decade, particularly among a specific subset of the population. The talk will illustrate some ways we can measure the magnitude and timing of the shifts and who seems to be driving them. It will show that the current period of tumult over feminism, antiracism, LGBTQ rights and related causes seems to be a ‘case’ of something. The talk will conclude with an exploration of how understanding the current moment in the context of previous cases can clarify what may have inspired the shifts – and what did not – and how trends may play out over the short-to-medium term.
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Hybrid: In Person, 402 Social Sciences Building & via Zoom
Today, it is common to treat every home as a potential business or a speculative asset, every person an entrepreneur, and every relationship a commercial opportunity. While these arrangements offer useful forms of flexibility, they are often accompanied by material precarity and insecurity. This talk grounds the ambiguities of “home-based” work in the 1980s, when the political-cultural regime of the family wage, that undergirded the standard labor contract, became undone. In this talk, I examine regulatory politics surrounding the fate of a New Deal era ban on industrial homework. In the 1980s, garment labor organizers concerned with immigrant sweatshops, Reagan administration labor regulators, and middle-class women, clashed over the significance and desirability of resurgent “home-based” work. While opponents of homework argued that its legalization would erode the foundations of the family wage, foreclose pathways for racial economic inclusion, and exacerbate gendered crises of care, proponents of homework portrayed it as a privatized resolution to the economic and social crises of the family wage, generating surprising appeal. This case suggests that the commercialization of…
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Hybrid: In Person, 402 Social Sciences Building & via Zoom
This talk is based on a chapter of Lewis' dissertation which draws on data from open-ended interviews and surveys with 83 Black adults from diverse class backgrounds in Cincinnati, OH–a city whose dynamic history is relevant to 21st Century discussions of community safety. In this presentation, he mobilizes the concept of safety reimagination to capture how class-diverse Black men and women reconstitute their community priorities to elevate root causes of poverty and persisting inequities as fundamental safety concerns to avoid gaslighting themselves and obscuring the material realities of their social condition(s).
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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…