Theory Section - Current Newsletter Online

Spring 2021- Letter From the Chair

7/17/2021

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.

Continuing a Comparative Historical Analysis and Theory Discussion

7/16/2021

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.

Public Sociology

7/15/2021

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

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.

The Making of Racial Hierarchies

7/14/2021

An Interview with Stefan Timmermans and Iddo Tavory

Perspectives Editors interviewed Stefan Timmermans and Iddo Tavory to discuss their recently published article “Racist Encounters: A Pragmatist Semiotic Analysis of Interaction” in Sociological Theory. Timmermans and Tavory develop a pragmatist semiotic approach to analyzing racial interactions, and specifically focus on how racial hierarchies are constituted or resisted in interactions.

Theory Spotlight: Sourabh Singh

7/13/2021

Sourabh Singh
Assisant Professor
Florida State University

Sourabh Singh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the Florida State University, Tallahassee. He specializes in the areas of Political Sociology, Sociological Theory, Comparative and Historical Sociology, and Culture. His work has been published in Sociological Theory, Theory and Society, Philosophy of Social Sciences, Journal of the Theory of Social Behavior, and Journal of Critical Realism. He teaches courses on Sociological Theory and Political Sociology.

Dissertation Spotlight: Emilio Lehoucq

7/13/2021

Emilio Lehoucq
Northwestern University
Website Twitter

I study a major transformation that occurred over last three decades. Now, every day, as we open our computers and phones we interact with and through machine learning. I ask why machine learning has spread since the mid 1990s across retail, finance, love, security, music, healthcare, manufacturing, and other institutions. Machine learning is a category of algorithms that “learn by themselves.” Programmers need relatively little a priori knowledge about the substantive domain. Instead, programmers decide over which model to use and how to adjust the model to the data based on the model’s predictive accuracy.

Dissertation Spotlight: Santiago Molina

7/12/2021

Santiago Molina
PhD Student
Uc Berkeley
Website

My dissertation, How Science Produces Institutions: The Practice and Politics of Genome Editing, examines the social, scientific, and political struggles being waged over the revolutionary genome-editing technology CRISPR-Cas9. With over 20 clinical trials for treating genetic diseases with CRISPR underway, stakeholders continue to debate issues of equity, racial justice, ethics, and ableism surrounding the modification of human DNA. I reframe these struggles theoretically as a problem of institutionalization: How is the idea and discourse of genome editing rendered into a durable set of practices that become legitimated and taken for granted? To answer this question, I draw from participant observation, in-depth interviews, and archival research to trace the trajectory of scientific practices as they move from the laboratory to the clinic and interrogate the sites at which decisions are made about the ethics, safety, and priorities of genome editing.

2021 ASA Theory Section Awards

7/11/2021

Junior Theorist Award

Winner
Paul Joosse and Robin Willey. 2020. “Gender and Charismatic Power,” Theory and Society, 49(4):533-561.

Honorable Mention
Christina Simko. 2020. “Marking Time in Memorials and Museums of Terror: Temporality and Cultural Trauma,” Sociological Theory 38(1):51-77.

Committee
Besnik Pula (chair)
Neil Gong
Katrina Quisumbing King
Poulami Roychowdhury

Junior Theorists Symposium

7/10/2021

15th Annual Junior Theorists Symposium
August 5th and 6th, 2021
Schedule of Events

Panels held via Zoom, open to all, closed captioning available
Please register via the link provided for each day you plan to attend
Donate to next year’s JTS! Venmo: @JTS-2021

Recent Publications

7/6/2021

To have your recent (2021) publications advertised in the Fall 2021 issue of Perspectives, please email us at theory.newsletter@gmail.com by Nov. 1.