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Perspectives
A NEWSLETTER OF THE ASA THEORY SECTION


Fall 2021- Letter From the Chair

12/19/2021

4 Comments

 

Claudio E. Benzecry
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

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The U.S., Latin America, and the Global South

Whether on dissertation committees, scholarly panels, or when conducting peer review, we have all been confronted by what to make of cases that do not happen in the United States. Are they generalizable? Exceptional? And what do we call these cases if they’re not in Western Europe: “third world”, “peripheral,” “developing”? A vocable has come to be preferred: “Global South.” 
This letter addresses this nominal issue, and cautions us against the facile and automatic use of a concept that has become devoid of the critical and relational character it was born with. As used in common sociological parlance, it is mobilized to make immediate sense of phenomena happening in non-US and non-Western European contexts, and transformed – to paraphrase Brazilian sociologist Gianpaolo Baiocchi – into a kind of orientalism in the name of diversity. The metaphor, when well used, refers not to an actual place but rather to a relational quality with respect to the metropole, which actually illuminates the same postcolonial and peripheral dynamics within, for instance, the US itself.  (Something currently advanced by scholars of race, many of them part of the DuBoisian Scholars Network.) 

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4 Comments

An Interview with Emily Erikson

12/18/2021

8 Comments

 
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Emily Erikson
​Yale University

An Interview with Emily Erikson, questions by Vasfiye Toprak (University of Virginia)
Trade and Nation: How Companies and Politics Reshaped Economic Thought 


VT: Can you tell us about how the idea for the book emerged? Did you always have a sense that the marginality of the merchants amidst the increase in chartered companies had something to do with the rise of economic and political thought?

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8 Comments

Civil Sphere Theory Review

12/17/2021

6 Comments

 

Hugs, Handshakes, and Theory:
​The Civil Sphere Working Group First Meeting
Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky 
Masaryk University

On October 18-19, 2021, forty-one scholars came together at the University of Trento in Italy to hold the inaugural meeting of the Civil Sphere Working Group. They marveled at the ability to meet and conference in person – after nearly two years of Zoom conferences – and to exchange a handshake, or even a hug. The excitement in the meeting auditorium was palpable, even if at times we were apprehensive about how to actually greet each other. The unifying factor was a desire to spend time together further developing and revising Civil Sphere Theory (CST), fifteen years after its seminal formulation in Jeffrey C. Alexander’s The Civil Sphere (Oxford UP, 2006).

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6 Comments

Dissertation Spotlight - Luis Flores Jr.

12/16/2021

22 Comments

 

Luis Flores Jr.
University of Michigan
Website 

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I am a historical sociologist engaged in economic, urban/regional, and inequality research. My research examines how the shifting regulatory boundary between home and market in the United States shapes labor markets, wealth, and social inequality.

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22 Comments

Dissertation Spotlight - Sam Hobson

12/15/2021

5 Comments

 
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Sam Hobson
​University of Michigan

My dissertation is about the ways in which structural power and oppression are replicated through acts of social justice and what that means for our attempts at social change. My work is with the food justice movement in NYC. Practices of food justice include urban agriculture, food education, and farmers’ markets. Although food justice is grounded in a structural analysis of race, class, and food, and incorporates an antiracist framework, my ethnographic research unveiled instances of structural oppression being created through food justice practices. These instances were the result of movement action of both white activists and non-white activists of high SES. So, my dissertation asks, how are the intentionally anti-racist movement practices of structurally powerful food justice activists reproducing structural oppression? ​

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5 Comments

Dissertation Spotlight- Mo Torres

12/14/2021

2 Comments

 

Mo Torres
Harvard University

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Michigan cities were considered "arsenals of democracy” in the mid-twentieth century, prosperous and productive places that spawned the American middle class. Today, Detroit, Flint, and other race-class subjugated (Soss & Weaver 2017) Michigan cities have become laboratories of urban austerity. Detroit is the largest U. S. city to have ever filed for bankruptcy, while Flint gained recent international attention for its deadly water crisis, and cities like Highland Park and Benton Harbor are among the most economically depressed in the country. While the "Rust Belt city" narrative has been endlessly rehearsed - all of these cities bled tax revenue as the result of industrial decline, white flight, and suburbanization - that these places would come to be governed by the logics of austerity was not a foregone conclusion. My dissertation asks how Michigan cities came to be governed by the logics and politics of austerity. What actions taken by what actors shaped the state’s urban agenda? What logics were at play in this process, and how did these logics function discursively?

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2 Comments

Recent Publications

12/13/2021

0 Comments

 

Books

Abrutyn, Seth and Omar Lizardo (eds). 2021. Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory. ​Springer Interational Publishing. 

Angelo, Hillary. 2021.
How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.


Bhambra, Gurminder K. and John Holmwood. 2021. Colonialism and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Brumberg-Chaumont, Julie & Claude Rosental (eds.). 2021. Logical Skills: Social-Historical Perspectives. New York: Birkhaüser.

Chuaqui, Jorge. 2021. Social Structure, Power, and the Individual. Toronto: Garth University Consortium Publishers. 

Rosental, Claude, The Demonstration Society, Cambridge (MA), MIT Press, 2021.

Schwarz, Ori. 2021. Sociological Theory for Digital Society: The Codes that Bind Us Together. Polity Press.

Luft, Aliza and Sue Thomson. 2021. “Race, Nation, and Resistance to State Symbolic Power in Rwanda Since the 1994 Genocide.” Global Historical Sociology of Race and Racism, Political Power and Social Theory. 38: 105-134
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Steinman, Erich. 2021. Settler colonialism and sociological knowledge: Insights and directions forward. Theory and Society. https://doi-org.ccl.idm.oclc.org/10.1007/s11186-021-09457-x. 

Taylor, A. 2021. “Audience Agency in Social Performance,” Cultural Sociology https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755211029604

Articles

0 Comments

Spring 2021- Letter From the Chair

7/17/2021

9 Comments

 

simone Polillo
University of Virginia

It has been an honor to serve as Chair of the Theory Section over the past year, but it surely has been an unusual experience: by the time the Chair-elect takes on this position, my job will have been fully virtual, bookended by two online ASA meetings, and consisting exclusively of virtual engagements—from email announcements to zoom meetings. This will not surprise any of you, as academia as a whole has moved online for the duration of the pandemic. And I am tempted to add, perhaps this is just a harbinger of things to come—as we rethink our carbon footprint, consider equity of access to conferences, and negotiate the increased role of technology in our research and professional lives, among many other things, virtual engagements will be here to stay.
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9 Comments

Continuing a Comparative Historical Analysis and Theory Discussion

7/16/2021

4 Comments

 

Performance and Populism:
In Conversation with Isaac Ariail Reed and Adam Slez

IOANA SENDRoIU
WEATHERHEAD CENTER FOR INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
​HARVARD UNIVERSITY

The following is a version of the comments I shared in response to Adam Slez and Isaac Ariail Reed’s presentations during the February 25th meeting of Comparative Historical Analysis and Theory (CHAT). Their presentations were based on their recent books, and a recording of the event can be found here: https://comparativehistorical.org/events/past-events/. I am grateful to both for the opportunity, and for their engagement with my comments. What I tried to do, through my comments, was to read each book through the prism of the other.

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4 Comments

Public Sociology

7/15/2021

3 Comments

 

Public Sociology and Social Theory 
An Interview with Demar Lewis
PhD Candidate, Yale University

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Demar F. Lewis IV is a PhD Candidate in Sociology & African American Studies at Yale University. He recently received an Honorable Mention for the 2021 ASA Theory Section’s Best Graduate Student Paper Award for his paper “Troubling America’s Historical Waters: Towards the Transdisciplinary Study of U.S. Lynchings as an Active Present.” Currently, Demar is a member of Cohort 3 of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Health Policy Research Scholars Program and the Spencer Cohort of the Institute for Critical, Quantitative, Computational, & Mixed Methodologies.

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3 Comments
<<Previous

    Fall 2021 Content

    Letter from the Chair

    An Interview with Emily Erikson

    Civil Sphere Theory Review

    Research Spotlights:
    Luis Flores Jr.
    Sam Hobson
    Mo Torres


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