Colloquia

Abstract: How wildfire drives inequalities in the built environment

Abstract: The #1 use case of generative AI in 2025 was for therapy and companionship, with tens of millions monthly users. Many who use AI companions say they seek to avoid shame, judgment, conflict, or simply that they don’t want to be a “burden” on others. The emotional trouble that we might call “relational friction” leads them to pursue AI as a technological exit option.  We need to know more about relational friction between human beings to understand what is at stake in these trends.  Existing research in education and design argues there is “productive” and “unproductive friction,” depending on whether tensions lead to openness and learning or to people turning away from challenge.   

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.

The years 1872-1928 were formative in American, and indeed global, history. They saw the consolidation of a gold standard order recognized by Karl Polanyi for its subordination of democratic demands to the dangerous fiction of self-regulating markets--alongside eerily familiar tendencies: repressive politics; jingoism, expansionism, and nativism; escalating inequality; big money campaigns; political and state-sponsored violence; and concentrated corporate power. The ensuing years dissolved into what Polanyi characterized as a near-collapse of Western civilization, following patterns recognized by WEB Du Bois as symptomatic of racial empire. 

Faculty Panel featuring Professors: Marion Fourcade, Yan Long,  Armando Millan, and Cihan Tugal.  Moderation by Sociology PhD candidate Daniel Lobo. This event is organized by the Graduate Student Association for Admitted Students during the 2026 visit weekend.    

Abstract: Americans are deeply divided about gender, with debates over gender identity, pronouns, parenting, public restrooms, and women's sports sparking intense conflict. In Gender Flashpoints: The Power of Dialogue, Abigail C. Saguy draws on interviews with 94 activists across the full political spectrum to understand the roots of these disagreements. She finds that beneath seemingly intractable conflicts lie disputes about advocacy goals, strategies, and whose rights matter most—but also surprising areas of agreement. When discussing gender-neutral restrooms, for instance, activists initially repeated polarized positions, yet deeper conversation revealed shared concerns about safety and privacy, along with enthusiasm across the political spectrum for redesigned public restrooms with fully enclosed stalls.

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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