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
How do we remake, not simply rebuild, our lives after trauma? Rebuilding suggests a return to a prior state, where the same plans, assumptions, and visions remain in place. Remaking is much more dramatic; it is transformative and generates fundamentally new ways of navigating the world. We often think of significant life transformations as highly individualistic and personal experiences. But drawing upon findings highlighted in her book, Remaking A Life: How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality, Watkins-Hayes analyzes the sociological dimensions of transformative life change and the process of healing from personal and collective injuries of inequality.
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via Zoom
The beginnings of the modern welfare state are often traced to the late nineteenth-century labor movement and to policymakers’ efforts to appeal to working-class voters. But regulatory welfare actually began a half century earlier with the passage of child labor laws. Middle-class reformers in Europe and the U.S. defined child labor as a threat to social order, built alliances to maneuver around powerful political blocks, and instituted new employment protections that initiated the partial decommodification of "free" labor.
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via Zoom
Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance of the Global Economy (University of California Press, 2021) uncovers the surprising influence of post-revolutionary Mexico on the twentieth century’s most important international economic institutions. Drawing on extensive archival research in Mexico, the United States, and Great Britain, Revolution in Development meticulously traces how Mexican officials repeatedly rallied Third World leaders to campaign for representation in global organizations and redistribution through multilateral institutions, from the 1920s through the 1970s. By decentering the United States and Europe in the history of global economic governance, Revolution in Development shows how Mexican economists, diplomats, and politicians fought for more than five decades to reform the rules and institutions of the global capitalist economy.
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via Zoom
More than a decade after the 2008 financial crisis plunged the world economy into recession, we still lack an adequate explanation for why it happened. Existing accounts identify a number of culprits—financial instruments, traders, regulators, capital flows—yet fail to grasp how the various puzzle pieces came together. The key is understanding what the banks were doing. There was a convergence of major U.S. banks on an identical business model: the vertical integration of originating and securitizing mortgages in order to maximize the extraction of profit from the securitization of mortgages. In my talk I discuss how all of the major U.S. banks and many European banks became dependent on mortgage securitization. Each firm originated mortgages, issued mortgage-backed securities, sold those securities, and, in many cases, acted as their own best customers by purchasing the same securities.
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via Zoom
This paper presents the basic argument of a book I am completing on how the Federal Constitution became a site of near unanimous public support in American life. I argue that the dominance and substantive meaning of constitutional veneration is actually a relatively recent development—the product of a series of interconnected political struggles between the American emergence onto the global stage with the Spanish-American War and World War I and the fallout of student and civil rights protest in the 1970s. In the process, the book raises a series of questions that have thus far been largely overlooked but that should be central to our conversations about the Constitution. How did our current consensus emerge? To what degree did such acceptance depend on the active suppression of alternatives? And what are the implications of this consensus and its history for contemporary political discourse and institutional possibilities? In engaging with these questions, I highlight how the Constitution became
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via Zoom
Previous research in middle-class districts has focused on within-school segregation but not between-school segregation. In this study, I unveil hidden institutional mechanisms of between-school segregation and inequality in an affluent, suburban school district. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic observations and 122 in-depth interviews with students, teachers, administrators, and parents at two dissimilar high schools, I identify distinct policies and practices of segregation that disproportionately place Black, Latinx, and lower-income students at risk. I also examine how institutional definitions of success and failure affect school policies and practices in ways that contribute to segregation and inequality, and how institutional actors leverage these definitions to legitimize and justify segregation in the district. This research is part of my forthcoming book Academic Apartheid: Race, School Culture, and the Symbolic Criminalization of Failure (University of California Press, expected Spring 2022), which sits at the sociological intersectio
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via Zoom
Social exclusion and discrimination lead to health detriments by elevating physiological stress responses. Previous research has shown that interactions with out-group race members increase bodily stress responses (i.e. cortisol changes, cardiovascular reactivity) and activation in brain regions related to feeling physical pain. However, some minority groups are better protected from these negative effects.
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via Zoom
Although humans have coexisted with dogs and cats for thousands of years, only recently have people openly included their pets as members of the family. Yet, because of the cultural ambivalence toward animals, what it means for a pet to “be” a family member remains unsettled. Drawing from research on family practices including kinship, household routines, childhood socialization, and domestic violence, this talk considers how pets participate in “doing” family and what their presence means for this social arrangement long considered quintessentially human. Today's more‐than‐human families represent a hybrid of relations, human and animal and social and natural, rather than an entirely new kind of family. Becoming family has always been contingent on a cast of nonhuman characters, and recognition of the “more‐than‐human” can enhance sociological understanding, not only of the family but also of other aspects of social life.
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via Zoom
The contemporary moment presents a crisis for political thought. It is not difficult to see that the resurgence of authoritarianism, the breakdown of political systems, and the approach of ecological apocalypse require a concerted and creative theoretical effort. Just as significant as the catastrophe of the present is the parallel emergence of unexpected social movements – but they have not succeeded in arresting the relentless drive to disaster. This talk proposes that we are unable to theorize our reality because we lack a vantage point of emancipation. This vantage point is not one which we could step out of history to assume, but rather is one which appears in particular moments, and ultimately recedes – it becomes exhausted. If we are unable to conceive of emancipation beyond the failure of previous attempts, we can only think the necessity of the existing situation.