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Perspectives
A NEWSLETTER OF THE ASA THEORY SECTION


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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2 Comments

Note from the Chair

12/23/2016

4 Comments

 
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Neil Gross
Colby College
​Some section chairs, I have noticed, are as good at writing inspiring and informative pieces for their section’s newsletters as they are at crafting powerful works of sociological scholarship. That’s not me. Although a long time ago I had a stint editing Perspectives, I find the conventions of the genre elusive, and the pressure to say something profound about the state of the field too much to bear. I begin with this confession to forewarn you that what follows is neither well-composed nor profound. But perhaps it will do its job of giving you a sense for why I put together the panels I did for the meetings in Montreal.

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4 Comments

Note from the Chair: Big Data/Big Theory (Part 2)

6/30/2016

3 Comments

 
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John Mohr
University of California,
​Santa Barbara
In the first part of this essay (Perspectives, Fall 2015), I suggested things are looking pretty good for sociological theory, an optimism grounded in my appreciation of emergent sociological sub-fields where interesting theoretical work is being paired with innovative new measurement regimes to create different kinds of sociological insights.  I pointed to the field of computational sociology (or Big Data social science) as an example.  In this second part, I offer a few reasons why I think this area of research will continue to need more and better theory in the years ahead. I highlight three causes, what I call: (1) the paradigm effect, (2) the data effect, and (3) the culture effect. 
 

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3 Comments

Theorizing across the Academy

5/22/2015

1 Comment

 
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Andrew Perrin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
In my last letter, I explored the different ways we do “theory” in sociology. I suggested that that diversity—not just of theoretical approaches, but of the very roles of theory itself—is a kind of productive dissonance, rather than chaos, at the core. The fact that these disparate projects come together under the theory umbrella—and that, therefore, the same people often read and engage with all of them—results in intellectual cross-fertilization that would not have happened with a more organized core. This mirrors my view of our discipline in general: if our weakness is the fact that we have no stable core of topics, methods, or theories, it is also our strength. The relatively free—maybe even chaotic—interplay of ideas fosters creativity.

To pursue this idea further, I decided to ask some colleagues who do “theory” in other disciplines what “theory” meant to them and to their disciplines. 

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1 Comment

Theory Of, Theory And, Theory From

12/12/2014

4 Comments

 
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Andrew Perrin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
It is a strange artifact of the ASA structure that we have a distinct section on sociological theory. For some time in our discipline's history, virtually everyone in the discipline was mostly doing things that are now labeled “theory.” And a nod to theory-building remains a hallmark of most empirical work in sociology, even as formal training in theory becomes less central. Theory-as-specialty is sometimes understood as a ritualistic paean to disciplinary forebears: the textual touchstone for graduate students before moving on to real sociology. Sometimes, by contrast, it is the work every sociologist does to abstract or generalize empirical findings, or to set them in context. How ought we understand, even promote, theory-as-specialty in the context of a discipline that understands theory in these ways?

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    FALL 2022 Content

    Letter from the Chair: "Theory as Translation"

    "An Interview with Jordanna Matlon, author of A Man Among Other Men"

    Book Symposium on A Man Among Other Men by Jordanna Matlon
    • Jessie Luna
    • Annie Hikido
    • Yannick Coenders
    • Anna Skarpelis

    Colonialism, Modernity and the Canon: An Interview with Gurminder K. Bhambra

    ​Emerging Social Theorists Spotlight
    • Heidi Nicholls
    • Miray Philips
    • Feyza Akova
    • Davon Norris

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