Colloquia
Sociology Department Colloquium Series
Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
MONDAYS, 2:00 - 3:30 PM
[unless otherwise noted]
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.
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via Zoom
I provide an introduction to the recent theoretical and empirical research on employer labor market power and labor discipline in economics. Recent research in economics has suggested that employer market power is not an anomaly, but rather pervasive, and not due to labor market structure, but instead the nature of work as a commodity.. I discuss how employer wage-setting relates to Marxian economics and normative concepts of economic domination and exploitation, the measurement of inequality, and economic institutions of American slavery, indentures, and collective bargaining.
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Suresh Naidu is Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He works on political economy and historical labor markets. He has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley economics, a MA from UMass Amherst, and a B/Math from the University of Waterloo.
via Zoom
How are immigration policies reshaping Latino families? Drawing on two waves of interviews with undocumented young adults, Enriquez investigates how immigration status creeps into the most personal aspects of everyday life, intersecting with gender to constrain family formation. The imprint of illegality remains, even upon obtaining DACA or permanent residency. Interweaving the perspectives of US citizen romantic partners and children, Enriquez illustrates the multigenerational punishment that limits the upward mobility of Latino families. Of Love and Papers sparks an intimate understanding of contemporary US immigration policies and their enduring consequences for immigrant families.
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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
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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