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Perspectives
A NEWSLETTER OF THE ASA THEORY SECTION


The Making of Racial Hierarchies

7/14/2021

3 Comments

 

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.

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Theory Spotlight: Sourabh Singh

7/13/2021

2 Comments

 

Sourabh Singh
Assisant Professor
Florida State University

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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.

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Dissertation Spotlight: Emilio Lehoucq

7/13/2021

6 Comments

 

Emilio Lehoucq
Northwestern University
Website       Twitter

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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.

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Dissertation Spotlight: Santiago Molina

7/12/2021

1 Comment

 

Santiago Molina
PhD Student
Uc Berkeley
Website

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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.

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2021 ASA Theory Section Awards

7/11/2021

1 Comment

 

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

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1 Comment

Junior Theorists Symposium

7/10/2021

3 Comments

 

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

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Recent Publications

7/6/2021

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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.  

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Fall 2020 - Letter from the Chair

12/16/2020

2 Comments

 
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Simone Pollilo
University of Virginia

Crisis and the Medium Term

I can’t imagine I have been alone in thinking about crisis over the past few, but seemingly interminable, months—and as I write, neither can I imagine that I am alone in my inability to shake off the feeling that, whatever crisis has been averted (there will be a peaceful transition of power in the United States; a vaccine is coming…), it is not only that long-standing crises are still festering—racial justice, social equality, expansive citizenship rights, environmental protection hardly seem within reach; it is also that new crises are likely developing under our very eyes, but, to paraphrase Roux-Doufort (in Schwarz, Seeger, and Auer 2016:28), the “signals” are too weak for us to properly understand what they entail for future developments.

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Teaching Theory at UCLA

12/15/2020

1 Comment

 

Should We Cancel The Core? 
Rebecca Jean Emigh
Johanna Hernández
Corey O'Malley

​Graduate students in our department (UCLA, Sociology) are only required to take one theory class, and the course is not required to focus on classical or contemporary theory per se. Rather, the topic is open, which allows us a great amount of freedom, clearly not open to others in which departments’ curricula demand particular content. As such, we wanted to experiment with the so-called “core” texts, trying to explore what is essential, useful, irrelevant, or biased.

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Teaching Theory at Washington University

12/15/2020

1 Comment

 

On Teaching Theory in a New Department
ADIA HARVEY WINGFIELD

In July 2020, Harvard Business Review published an article by Adia Harvey Wingfield reflecting on building the Washington University Sociology department from the ground up, resulting in one of the most diverse academic departments in the country only five years after its conception.  We followed up with Professor Wingfield, who teaches the primary theory courses in the department, to ask how WashU Sociology's approach to a new, diverse, department affects the way they teach theory.

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    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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