Colloquia

Sociology Department Colloquium Series
Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
MONDAYS, 2:00 - 3:30 PM
[unless otherwise noted]

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via Zoom
Economic nationalism has returned to the fore of scholarly and policy debates. The concept took on renewed significance in the wake of the global financial crisis as countries sought to respond to the domestic effects of the economic disaster. Nationalist responses were initially praised by some who saw them as logical mechanisms to protect domestic economies and condemned by others fearing the shadow of the Great Depression and the rise of fascism that kindled inter-state rivalries and led to World War II. The latter concern has become more prescient in more recent years with the rise of right-wing authoritarian nationalism, in the US, Europe and of course India and Brazil.
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via Zoom
The number of Americans arrested, brought to court, and incarcerated has skyrocketed in recent decades. Criminal defendants come from all races and economic walks of life, but they experience punishment in vastly different ways. How and why is the criminal court process unequal? This talk draws on findings from my book Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court (Princeton University Press, November 2020). Drawing on fieldwork and interviews in the Boston court system, I show that lawyers and judges often silence, coerce, and punish disadvantaged defendants when they try to learn their legal rights and advocate for themselves. These dynamics reveal how unwritten institutional and organizational norms devalue the exercise of legal rights among the disadvantaged, and that ensuring effective legal representation is no guarantee of justice.
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via Zoom
What we know about social life at any given time are the things that are easy to conceptualize and to measure. What we don't know are things that are very "small," very numerous, very widely distributed, and largely invisible. I shall call such things “pervasions.” Examples are language, etiquette, concepts of temporality,  bodily habits, even "attitudes." I shall argue that pervasions are typically maintained by non-institutional mechanisms. That is, they do not arise from social structures with rules, logics, monitoring, and error correction – systems with negative feedback. Rather they arise from various kinds of stochastic resonance within the social process, most easily illustrated by processes with reflecting barriers and Markov chains of certain kinds. These resonances give pervasions their characteristic combination of large variability at small scale with small variability at large scale, a combination that is problematic for both theory and method in the social sciences.
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via Zoom
Over the last two decades, gentrification has spread to more neighborhoods across more cities at an unprecedented pace. Yet, racial residential segregation remains a defining feature of the U.S. landscape. In this talk, I draw from multiple analyses to demonstrate the pernicious ways in which gentrification perpetuates racial inequality, even in the absence of increased displacement. Drawing on a national-level analysis employing novel measures of gentrification and segregation, I show the ways in which poor Black urban residents remain segregated where gentrification is prevalent. Second, using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I demonstrate how racially stratified residential sorting persists regardless of gentrification, while mobility rates are unaffected. Last, I employ a unique large-scale, longitudinal consumer credit dataset of residents in Philadelphia and the San Francisco Bay Area to show how residential outcomes remain racially stratified across distinct housing markets.
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via Zoom
The Speculative Pandemic:  Epidemic risk, Necrofinance and the World Bank
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via Zoom
Fluctuations in human density and mobility are important drivers of epidemics, particularly in the context of large cities in low- and middle-income countries, which can act to amplify and spread local epidemics. In this talk, I will be discussing some of my recent work looking at the impact of travel on the spread of infectious diseases (including COVID-19) in Bangladesh. This work highlights the impact of large-scale population movements, particularly during holidays, on the spread of infectious diseases, and demonstrates the value of real-time data from mobile phones and social media for outbreak analysis and forecasting. -----
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via Zoom
The combination of expanding, racialized punishment in the criminal legal system and increasingly punitive immigration policies has led to unprecedented growth in the number of Latina women under community supervision in the United States. Multiplying their surveillance, Latinas may be placed under community supervision through the criminal legal system’s enforcement of parole and probation, as well as through the Department of Homeland Security’s Alternative to Detention (ATD) programs. These forms of community supervision may have distinct and significant consequences for the health and health care of both US- and foreign-born Latinas as they face varying concerns about their criminal legal status and immigration status. The rise of community supervision in both the criminal legal system and the immigration system may therefore have significant implications for Latinas at the population level. No study to date, however, has investigated the potential impacts of community supervision among Latina women nationwide.
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Hybrid: via Zoom and in-person at 402 Social Sciences Building
Noncitizens seeking to make sense of US immigration systems encounter a labyrinth of information and deception. In a national study of scams (2011-2014) targeting noncitizens seeking immigration legal services, I use administrative and secondary data sources to analyze the correlates of immigration scam complaints submitted to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). I find welcoming counties have more immigration scam complaints, and counties with exclusionary contexts tend to have less complaints. The results do not suggest scams are more prevalent in welcoming contexts because the actual number of scams is unknown. Instead, we can conclude noncitizens tend to come forward to report immigration scams in welcoming contexts of reception, even after accounting for exclusionary policies. A robust safety net proved the most reliable predictor of immigration scams reported to the FTC.
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Hybrid: via Zoom and in-person at 402 Social Sciences Building
Immigrant “sanctuary” jurisdictions have recently reentered U.S. political discourse and engendered contentious debates regarding their legality and influence on public safety. Critics argue that sanctuary jurisdictions threaten local communities by impeding federal immigration enforcement efforts. Proponents maintain that the policies improve public safety by fostering institutional trust within immigrant communities and by increasing the willingness of immigrant community members to notify the police after they are victimized – changes which bolster community levels of formal and informal social control. In this presentation, I situate expectations from the immigrant sanctuary literature within a multilevel, contextualized help-seeking framework and discuss how crime-reporting behavior empirically varies across immigrant sanctuary contexts over a 25-year period. ----
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via Zoom
This talk will focus on the impact of ICE surveillance – electronic monitor (EM) – on immigrants, and their communities.  She shares insights on how EM operates as a surveillance tool that influences the immigrant’s relationship with the state, community, and self. Release from detention could conceivably provide an immigrant with the benefits of reintegration into a co-ethnic community. However, under surveillance, the immigrant loses access to co-ethnic social capital, as the state fractures their safety net. Thus, EM operates as a tool of legal violence, creating a new axis of stratification and producing the unequal distribution of autonomy and resources. EM generates a condition of ‘extended punishment’ that consists of material and social harms that affect immigrants, families, and communities. ----