Colloquia

Abstract: TBD   Allison Pugh is Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. Her research and teaching focus on how powerful economic trends from job insecurity to automation shape the way people forge meaning, dignity and connection.  Her fourth book The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World (Princeton 2024) is a study of the standardization of work that relies on relationship, and recently won the 2025 best book award from the American Sociological Association (ASA).  It has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, and Science and named to several “best of 2024” lists. The 2024-5 ASA Vice President, Pugh has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Berggruen Institute, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and a visiting scholar in Germany, France and Australia.  

Abstract:  The talk is based on Bandelj’s new book, which examines how we turned children into financial and emotional investments and child-rearing into laborious work. At the turn of the twentieth century, children went from being economically useful, often working to support families, to being seen by their parents as vulnerable and emotionally priceless. In the new millennium, however, parents have become overinvested in the emotional economy of parenting. Analyzing in-depth interviews with parents, national financial datasets, and decades of child-rearing books reveals how parents today spend, save, and even go into debt for the sake of children. They take on parenting as the hardest but most important job and commit their entire selves to being a good parent. The economization and emotionalization of society work together to drive parental overinvestment, offering a dizzying array of products and platforms to turn children into human capital—from financial instruments to extracurricular programs to therapeutic parenting advice.

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Abstract:  Claims about the enormous costs of Big Science blame public sector inefficiencies, insufficiencies, and folk psychologies that presumably produce high costs and late deliveries.  In this talk, I bring together long term ethnography and archival work with NASA missions, with insights from relational economic sociology and science and technology studies, to reveal the organizational root cause of cost escalation in the Big Sciences.  My study of the Europa Clipper project began during the economic crash of 2009, endured through the political uncertainty of the twenty-teens and the Covid-19 crisis. During this time, I observed how planetary scientists and space engineers were driven by a combination of funding uncertainties, austerity economics, and neoliberal pressures toward outsourcing to enroll increasing numbers of stakeholders in their projects in an effort to keep costs low. However, these same efforts frustrated costing mechanisms, delivered unequal effects upon minority scientists, and left government employees with fiscal egg on their face.

Abstract: How do Americans decide what is (or isn’t) fair? Drawing from a nationally-representative conjoint experiment with open-ended free text responses, this study illustrates the dimensions that inform normative judgments on how Americans prefer to distribute educational resources between two fictitious middle school students with varying characteristics. First, I find that people prioritize the lower performing student but do not adjust for differences in effort levels. Second, some – but not all – demographic characteristics influence allocation decisions: respondents allocate additional time to those from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds and to individuals with disabilities, in part because they perceive both structural disadvantage and potential for improvement for these groups.

Abstract: The application of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 to sexual harassment remains enormously controversial. Over the last 15 years, US federal officials have issued three different policies specifying what it means to comply with this civil rights law, which prohibits schools from discriminating “on the basis of sex.” These political and organizational battles over Title IX center on the question of how, not whether, the law should regulate sexual harassment.

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  Abstract:  Education acts on social stratification in multiple ways. Past work emphasizes two generic mechanisms—unequal access to education and heterogenous returns to education across social-origin groups—that can either increase or decrease pre-existing group differences. This talk identifies a new, third, mechanism by which education may affect between-group differences—differential sorting into education within groups. We make three contributions. First, we introduce a non-parametric causal decomposition that cleanly disambiguates all three mechanisms. Second, we develop semi-parametric estimators for all components under standard assumptions. Third, we present empirical applications and show that college graduation plays multiple and nearly countervailing causal roles in intergenerational income mobility, including via the new mechanism. (Joint work with Jen-Chen Chao and Ang Yu.) Felix Elwert, Ph.D. is the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and editor-in-chief of Sociological Methods & Research.