A.K.M. Skarpelis,
​New York Univ.

Clayton Childress,
​Univ of Toronto

On Friday, August 19, at Seattle University, we had the pleasure of coordinating the tenth Junior Theorists’ Symposium (JTS). We think it prudent not only to celebrate this year’s event, but also to wax poetic about what we hope will be JTS’ long and vibrant future. Rather than having a continuous leadership, JTS relies on a stewardship model in which the power to select papers and assemble panels fully rotates from year to year. ​ By nature of its design, therefore, JTS is constantly evolving, and is heterodox in “its” interests and emphases. We believe JTS is all the stronger for this.

Location: Seattle University 
Wyckoff Auditorium (Engineering 200)

August 19, 2016

To facilitate planning, please RSVP by email to juniortheorists@gmail.com with the subject line “JTS RSVP.”

JTS is a donation-based event, with a suggested donation of $20 per faculty member and $10 per graduate student.

Click below to donate in advance through the Junior Theorists PayPal account.

See below for the full schedule of speakers

Claire Laurier Decoteau
University of Illinois at Chicago

The 2015 Junior Theorist Award Lecture

​“I can tell you the exact date that I began to think of myself in the first-person plural …” (Pollan 2013)
 
This story is about a group of parents of children with autism in the Somali diaspora who think of themselves in the multiple, and how this constitutes both a postcolonial critique of Western biomedicine and a radical rethinking of the relationship between the social and biological body.  There is growing statistical evidence that Somali refugees and immigrants have higher prevalence rates of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) than some other ethnic/racial groups (Barnevik-Olsson et al. 2008; University of Minnesota 2013).  Somalis in North America call autism the “Western disease” because there is no word for autism in the Somali language and because, they claim, it does not exist in Somalia (Brisson-Smith 2009).  

Hillary Angelo, University of California, Santa Cruz

​Ellis Monk, University of Chicago

The ninth Junior Theorists’ Symposium (JTS) was held at the University of Chicago on Friday, August 21st. The one-day conference featured the work of nine junior scholars and three senior discussants: Patricia Hill Collins (University of Maryland), George Steinmetz (University of Michigan – Ann Arbor), and Gary Alan Fine (Northwestern University).

JTS began nine years ago as opportunity for sociologists at the earliest stages of their careers to engage prominent ‘senior’ theorists in conversation, and as a place to share creative, original, and half-baked ideas. 

Jordanna Matlon,
 Institute for Advanced Study, Toulouse

Dan Hirschman, University of Michigan

The eighth Junior Theorists’ Symposium (JTS) was held at the University of California, Berkeley on Friday, August 15th. The one-day conference featured the work of nine junior scholars and three senior discussants: Omar Lizardo (University of Notre Dame), Marion Fourcade (University of California, Berkeley), and Saskia Sassen (Columbia University).

As an entry point for novel ideas and a place where sociologists at the earliest stages of their career engage with some of the most prolific and critical theorists in the field, we envisioned JTS as fertile ground for engaging the full spectrum of sociology and for provincializing our contemporary theoretical traditions. In our commitment to preserving JTS as one of the few places where not only junior scholars, but also junior scholarship (half-baked ideas, unfinished pieces of much larger puzzles), receives a public platform, we were particularly interested in selecting papers that were both highly original and at times still in the process of their conceptual development. 

This year, we wanted to push the boundaries of theory and interrogate how sociologists demarcate sociological “theory” from empirical work and from other theoretical traditions. 

Stefan Bargheer, 
University of California, Los Angeles

Theory, as Robert Merton (1945) pointed out more than half a century ago, is not a unified concept. There were at least six different notions of theory in use at the time he was writing, and it seems that since then the list has grown longer rather than shorter. A text identified as good theory from the point of view of one of these notions may not qualify as such based on the criteria of another. I would like to carry the argument one step further: not only does the value assigned to a text as theory change depending on which category of theory is used, but the classification of a text as “theory” in the first place is likewise contingent. Scholarly texts have careers or biographies. Some of the most recognized sociological texts started as one thing and ended up as another—that is, they were labeled as “empirical research” when they were first published and became re-classified over time as “sociological theory.”

Margaret Frye
Harvard University

"...what leads some fields to be considered 'more theoretical' than others? "

The prompt for the 2014 Junior Theorists’ Symposium (JTS) after-panel, provided by Jordanna Matlon and Dan Hirschman, read in part: “We would like to use the after-panel to initiate a conversation as to why some areas are considered ‘theory’ while others stand at the discipline's margins, and similarly why some empirical work seem to be considered ‘more theoretical’ than other work.”

As any self-respecting demographer would, I began by searching for data. In particular, I sought to identify which areas or subfields are considered “more theoretical” within sociology. I identified four separate sources of data, two collected in 2004 and two that I collected myself in preparation for the panel. To foreshadow my results, I found a surprising amount of consensus concerning which subfields emerge as the most centrally “theoretical.”