Theory Section
  • Info
    • Theory Events ASA Virtual Engagement Meeting
    • Bylaws
    • Section officers
    • Announcements
    • For Students
    • Junior Theorist Symposium
  • Newsletters
    • Current Newsletter Online
    • PDF Archives
  • Awards
    • Awards Overview
    • How to Submit
    • Theory Prize
    • Junior Theorist Award
    • Best Student Paper Award
    • Coser Award
  • Resources
    • New Publications
    • Theory Journals
    • Teaching Theory
    • Theory Syllabi
    • Theory Webpages

Perspectives
A NEWSLETTER OF THE ASA THEORY SECTION


Feminism at a Crossroads: Key takeaways from Latin America

8/29/2022

2 Comments

 

Elisabeth Jay Friedman
​(
University of San Francisco)

​
Constanza Tabbush
​(
University of Buenos Aires-CONICET and UN Women)

​
Gisela Zaremberg,
(
Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences [FLACSO] Campus Mexico)

On a range of gender justice issues, particularly abortion rights, the United States has been positioned as an example for ‘lagging’ Catholic Latin American countries to emulate. Recently, the tables appear to have turned, challenging linear understandings of progress and shifting notions of who is trailing whom. Despite fierce opposition, most Catholic Latin American countries continue on a liberalizing path to expanding sexual and reproductive rights. After the pioneer case of Uruguay, which enshrined the right to abortion in law in 2012, others have followed suit: Chile expanded sexual and reproductive rights in 2017; Colombia and Mexico decriminalized abortion in 2022; and the Argentine Congress legalized abortion rights in 2020. Moving in exactly the opposite direction, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe vs. Wade has rolled back 50 years of women’s constitutional right to abortion. The U.S. has now joined ranks with Nicaragua and Honduras, the only other countries in the Americas that have moved towards restricting abortion in these past years. The Court’s decision is probably the most significant regression in women’s rights seen on the American continent, because it will put countless lives at risk. It also threatens access to contraception and regression with respect to both marriage equality and gender-affirming medical care, and is likely to bolster anti-abortion and radical conservative groups globally.

Read More
2 Comments

Debt, Greed, and Disasters: For a Plausible Study of Puerto Rico and its Systemic Risk

8/29/2022

2 Comments

 

Salvador Vidal-Ortiz
(American University)

The task of thinking through coloniality and Puerto Rico (in its relation to Latin America and to USAmerican sociology) for the Theory Section’s newsletter is an overwhelming one. What makes it so is that there are a multitude of ways in which Puerto Rico is and it is not part of both Latin America and the United States; yet, given the forces of empire in thinking and theorizing social and sociological projects, this task requires our attention. The reminiscence of Caribbean traces onto Puerto Rico and back at the rest of the Caribbean make a loop, resulting in the unit of analysis to be not a fixed entity, and somewhat slippery: Puerto Rico is, and isn’t, a country, although it has remained a nation in spite of this history. The Island (or archipelago, as some have begun to refer to it) continues to struggle and strive in motions and movements that have impacted it to its core. The notion of movements here takes literal meaning – so called natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes heightened by global climate change crisis and the extraction of natural resources in and around the Island; as it has with the flow of hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans from the Island, to the U.S., and the rest of the world. Among these unnatural disasters shaking the Island is an external debt of 72 billion dollars. A sign of its colonial status, Puerto Rico was not seen as an independent nation like others that seek refinancing and restructuring from organisms such as the International Monetary Fund, while at the same time, it could not receive U.S. support given that Puerto Rico is not a U.S. state, but a territory. Moreover, there was a U.S. (Federal) fiscal board (under a bill whose acronym is PROMESA or “promise” – an irony still pressing on the open wound) that managed to, until very recently, restructure portions of the Island’s budget, with surveillance for years to come.[1]

Read More
2 Comments

The State of the Canon: Sociological Theory Syllabi in the United States

8/29/2022

1 Comment

 

Charles Kurzman
(University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
December 28, 2021

When I was in graduate school in the 1980s, the syllabus for my required course in sociological theory started with Karl Marx and ended with Max Weber. In between, we read Emile Durkheim. That was it.
 
Even then, this limited canon was considered anomalous. The syllabus I was handed as a teaching assistant included social interactionism, post-structuralism, and feminism. The first undergraduate theory course I taught on my own added ethnomethodology, postmodernism, and the study of racialized inequality, working mainly from the anthology assembled by Charles Lemert, who aimed to place “multicultural” theories on par with the “white, male advocates of European culture who wrote the first, best-known social theories.” (The fifth edition of Lemert’s anthology, published in 2013, expanded its title to include “global” theories as well.)

Read More
1 Comment

Emerging theorist spotlight: abigail cary moore

8/29/2022

1 Comment

 

abigail cary moore
​(University of Virginia)

My dissertation, Binding a Future of Violence: Acts, Signs, and Interpretations in the Racial State, was born out of wondering what it would mean to think of the state not as having a monopoly on legitimate violence, but as having a monopoly on the processes of legitimation for violence. 

While these phrases may amount to very similar things in practice, ​approaching the relationship between the state and various
Picture
forms of violence from the perspective of legitimation shifts the analytical emphasis to processes of interpretation, and the legal validation and perpetuation of certain interpretations over others. 

I analyze the oral arguments of myriad court cases involving disputes about the definition and legality of certain kinds of violence, including U.S. Supreme Court cases declaring the KKK’s ritual of burning crosses an act of protected speech rather than a threat of violence (Virginia v. Black 2003), and the boundaries of legal police use of force (Tennessee v. Garner 1984; Graham v. Connor 1989; Scott v. Harris 2007), as well as cases in the lower courts, such as the 2021 trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, at which the teen was acquitted for the shootings that resulted in the deaths of two men and injury of a third in Kenosha, WI. Through the textual analysis of these cases, it became clear that much of the interpretation taking place in the courtroom was deeply temporal, rooted in varying ways of situating a single sign in time.  Thus, I argue that temporality is a crucial and undertheorized dimension of interpretation.  


Moreover, my work examines acts of interpretation, with temporality at their cores, as acts of performative power.  While performative power has primarily been theorized as arising in moments of dramatic change, if we return to the semiotic roots of the concept, particularly in the works of Judith Butler (through Derrida and JL Austin), we can use generative iteration of performative power as a way to describe and explain variably durable discourses and patterns of action.  While the Supreme Court is perhaps a paradigmatic site of this phenomenon in action, I posit iteration as a useful way to interrogate the relationship between interpretation, performative power, and durability in any number of social structures.  
​


Abigail Cary Moore is a cultural sociologist with interests in social theory, semiotics, race, and law and society.  She holds a B.A. from Yale University in English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and an M.A. from the University of Virginia in Sociology.  She will receive her Ph.D. from UVA in May 2023.  Most recent publications include “Signs and Their Temporality: The Performative Power of Interpretation in the Supreme Court” (2022) in Sociological Theory; and “Policing Potential Violence” (2022) in New Political Science. 

1 Comment

Emerging theorist spotlight: Birgan Gokmenoglu

8/29/2022

1 Comment

 

birgan Gokmenoglu
(BirmingHam city university)

I study the relationship between time and power in contentious politics, with a focus on Turkey and more recently the UK. I am interested in understanding time as an instrument of power and resistance, and in conceptualizing some of the specifically temporal dynamics of socio-political life, with a view to developing a political sociology of time.
​

These temporal dynamics may range from electoral cycles to disruptions to the electoral schedule, from synchronization to temporal dissonance, from future projections to collective memory, from political imagination to constructions of utopia and dystopia, from
Picture
short notices to waiting times, from the unequal distribution of time across social groups to anticipation, dread, hope, the possible and the potential.

As a qualitative researcher, I analyze the temporal dynamics of socio-political life through experiences of time, narratives of time, and practices of timing. Temporal experiences, narratives, and practices not only shape and are shaped by political horizons, discourses, and imaginations, but are also embedded in everyday material life. In my previous research on the participatory-democratic local assemblies in Istanbul, the interconnectedness of the temporal and the material manifested in activists’ tactics and the organizational structures that they built. In the same study, I also found that resistance against an authoritarian regime accentuated a “politics of anticipation” where the future itself became the terrain of contention. The politics of anticipation involved both the futurity that is inherent in politics, and also the necessity on the part of the activists to constantly reorient themselves and each other towards anticipated futures. 
​

My current theoretical project aims to conceptualize “political time” and the “political calendar,” taking inspiration from Barbara Adam’s timescape perspective and Bourdieu’s concept of the political field; incorporating insights from cultural sociology and the theory of interaction, especially the work of Nina Eliasoph and Iddo Tavory. With this project, I seek to contribute a conceptual tool to talk about time in politics, to bridge different studies and disciplines.

My work thus far has focused on the temporal interactions between activists and the regime in Turkey. Moving forward, my next research project will be on how the above mentioned temporal dynamics play a role in creating and maintaining specifically raced, classed, and gendered inequalities in the climate justice movement in the UK. Barbara Adam is again an inspiration, along with Sarah Sharma, Sara Pursley, Lisa Baraitser, Judy Wajcman, Laura Bear, among other critical thinkers.

This body of work seeks ultimately to contribute to developing the political sociology of time, sociology of time and the future, and critical time studies, as well as political sociology and sociological theory more broadly.

Dr. Birgan Gokmenoglu is a political ethnographer whose research interests are in social and political theory, social movements and contentious politics, time and temporality, alternatives to liberal democracy, and struggles for social justice. She holds a PhD in Political Sociology from the London School of Economics and an MA in Sociology from the University of Southern California. She is currently Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Sociology at Birmingham City University (UK).


1 Comment

ASA Theory section awards 2022

8/29/2022

2 Comments

 

Theory section awards

Lewis Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting:
Claire Decoteau, University of Illinois, Chicago

Theory Prize (Book) 
Co-winners:
Charles Camic, Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics
Paige L. Sweet, The Politics of Surviving: How Women Navigate Domestic Violence and Its Aftermath
 
Honorable Mention:
Monika Krause, Model Cases: On Canonical Research Objects and Sites 

Junior Theorist Award
Winner:
Hirschman, Daniel. 2021. "Rediscovering the 1%: Knowledge Infrastructures and the Stylized Facts of Inequality." American Journal of Sociology 127(3): 739-786.
 
Honorable Mention:
Scoville, Caleb. 2022. Tufts University. “Constructing Environmental Compliance: Law, Science, and Endangered Species Conservation in California’s Delta.” American Journal of Sociology 127 (4). 

Best Student Paper Award
Winner:
Gordon Brett (Toronto) "Dueling with Dual Process Models. Cognition, Creativity and Context." Sociological Theory 40 (2): 179-201
 
Honorable Mention: 
Mary Shi (Berkeley) "”Until Indian title shall be… fairly extinguished:” The Public Lands, Settler Colonialism, and Early Government Promotion of Infrastructure in the United States."

​
2 Comments

Summer 2022 - Recent Publications

8/29/2022

0 Comments

 

Recent Publications

Charrad, Mounira M., Amina Zarrugh and Hyun Jeong Ha. 2021. “The Arab Spring Protests.”  Contexts: Sociology for the Public, 20 (1): 58-61.    
 
Charrad, Mounira M. Amina Zarrugh & Hyun Jeong Ha. 2021. “The Reclamation Master Frame: A Visual Study of the Arab Uprisings.”. 2021. Research in Social Movements, Conflicts & Change. Vol 44: 11-35.  https://doi.org/10.1108/S0163-786X20210000044004.

Moore, Abigail Cary. 2022. "Signs and Their Temporality: The Performative Power of Interpretation in the Supreme Court," Sociological Theory  https://doi.org/10.1177/07352751221110240.

Staubmann, Helmut. 2022. Sociology in a New Key: Essays in Social Theory and Aesthetics. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature Switzerland AG. 
0 Comments

Fall 2021- Letter From the Chair

12/19/2021

5 Comments

 

Claudio E. Benzecry
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

Picture
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.) 

Read More
5 Comments

An Interview with Emily Erikson

12/18/2021

19 Comments

 
Picture

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?

Read More
19 Comments

Civil Sphere Theory Review

12/17/2021

9 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).

Read More
9 Comments

Dissertation Spotlight - Luis Flores Jr.

12/16/2021

28 Comments

 

Luis Flores Jr.
University of Michigan
Website 

Picture
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.

Read More
28 Comments

Dissertation Spotlight - Sam Hobson

12/15/2021

5 Comments

 
Picture

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? ​

Read More
5 Comments

Dissertation Spotlight- Mo Torres

12/14/2021

9 Comments

 

Mo Torres
Harvard University

Picture
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?

Read More
9 Comments

Recent Publications

12/13/2021

2 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
​

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

2 Comments

Spring 2021- Letter From the Chair

7/17/2021

11 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.
Picture

Read More
11 Comments
<<Previous
Forward>>

    summer 2022 Content

    Letter from the Chair: "Sociology From/Of Latin America"

    "Migration Myopias and Insights from the Global South"

    "Cannibalizing the Northern Environmental Justice Perspective"

    "Plurinationality as an Idea and a Reality in 21st Century Bolivia, Ecuador, and Chile"

    "Feminism at a Crossroads: Key Takeaways from Latin America"

    "Debt, Greed, and Disasters: For a Plausible Study of Puerto Rico and its Systemic Risk"

    "The State of the Canon: Sociological Theory Syllabi in the United States"

    Emerging Theorist Spotlight: Birgan Gokmenoglu

    Emerging Theorist Spotlight: Abigail Cary Moore

    Theory Section Awards

    Recent Publications

    EDITORS

    Vasfiye Toprak
    ​Abigail Cary Moore
    Anne Taylor​

    Archives

    August 2022
    December 2021
    July 2021
    December 2020
    August 2020
    December 2019
    July 2019
    January 2019
    June 2018
    December 2017
    December 2016
    June 2016
    April 2016
    December 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    February 2015
    December 2014

    Categories

    All
    ASA Meetings
    Awards
    Big Data
    Book Review
    CFP
    Conference Recap
    Dissertation Spotlight
    Interactive
    JTS
    JTS2014
    Letter From The Editors
    News & Notes
    Notes From The Chair
    Pragmatism
    Prizes
    Recent Publications
    Teaching
    The Classics
    Winners Dialogue

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly