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Perspectives
A NEWSLETTER OF THE ASA THEORY SECTION


Summer 2020 - Dissertation Spotlight

8/1/2020

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Matthew H. McLeskey - University at Buffalo, SUNY
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Anna Skarpelis - Harvard University
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Nir Rotem - University of Minnesota

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JTS Panel 1: Cities, Infrastructure, and Nature

8/1/2020

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Theorizing the Absent Object: Industrial Transportation Infrastructure Decline as Narrative Symbol in the American Rust Belt
Amanda McMillan Lequieu
Assistant Professor, Drexel University

“This used to be the parking lot,” Jesús laughed, as we piled out of his car. He and his friend Marcos pulled me into the large field of prairie grass and scrawny trees that I had been driving by, oblivious, for months while conducting fieldwork in the southeastern most neighborhood of Chicago. “There’s the dock,” Marcos said, guiding us to the edge of a watery parking spot for ships that for nearly a century delivered iron ore pellets from sources across the Great Lakes. Jesús picked up a taconite iron pellet from the edge of the dock and handed it to me. “I remember my father, when he would hear the ore boats in the [dock], he would always say, ‘That’s the sound of money.’”

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JTS Panel 2: Classification, Valuation, and Legitimacy

8/1/2020

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​The Innovation Story: Profits, Prices, and Legitimacy in the Pharmaceutical Market
Laura Halcomb - University of California at Santa Barbara

Over the last 100 years, the institution of American medicine has advanced from relative mediocracy to a preeminent position as a world leader in research. During this race to the top, healthcare became the fastest growing financial segment of the US economy, and patients have faced high and ever-rising prescription drug prices.

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JTS Panel 3: Performing Gender & Race

8/1/2020

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Gender and Vulnerability: How Interaction Power Dynamics Shape Assisted Injection Practices by People who Inject Drugs
Sarah Brothers - Yale University

In the United States, about half of the 1.3 to 1.8 million people who currently inject drugs (Brady et al. 2008) give or receive injection assistance, in which one person injects another person with illicit drugs. People receiving injection assistance are at increased risk of venous damage and are more than twice as likely than other people who inject drugs to be infected with Hepatitis C and HIV. Further, overdose risk for assisted injection recipients is twice that of other people who inject drugs, for whom it is the leading cause of death.


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Letter from the Chair: Theory in the Trenches

12/18/2019

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Greta Krippner - University of Michigan
As I suspect is the case for many members of the Section, my identity as a social theorist is inseparably tied to my identity as a teacher of undergraduate and especially graduate courses on sociological theory. ​​Certainly, my engagement with and commitment to especially classical sociological theory has been deepened by my experience teaching the first-semester theory course to incoming graduate students at the University of Michigan almost continuously now for well over a decade. The task of brushing the dust off of canonical texts and making them sparkle anew for fresh recruits to Sociology – whether or not they see themselves as inclined toward theory – is an exhilarating challenge that defines the fall for me as much as shortened days and turning leaves.​
Lately, this challenge has become a more daunting one. The canon is now under assault in a way that requires those of us who have oriented our teaching careers to transmitting these works to new generations of students to pause and take a step back. Graduate students have become increasingly skeptical – and in some cases, totally dismissive – that works written by “dead white men” (namely, Marx, Weber, and Durkheim) could have produced insights that are in any way relevant to the contemporary practice of sociology. My own syllabus is particularly vulnerable to these critiques since it begins not with classical sociological theory per se, but with the utilitarian/liberal tradition in political thought against which Marx and Durkheim in particular reacted in constituting a nascent sociological approach. (If you think that it is difficult to convince skeptical graduate students that there is any utility in reading Marx, try convincing them to read Locke!)

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Mechanism as Metaphor: Conversation with Carly Knight and Isaac Reed

12/18/2019

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Carly R. Knight
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Isaac A. Reed
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Interviewed by Luis Flores, Perspectives Co-Editor
In their article “Meaning and Modularity: The Multivalence of ‘Mechanism’ in Sociological Explanation” (2019, Sociological Theory), Knight and Reed disentangle and explore contradictions between “modular” and “meaningful” mechanistic models. The disjuncture, they argue, is grounded in “incompatible causal foundations and entails mechanistic models with distinct and conflicting evidentiary standards.” Below is a conversation with the authors on their provocative article.

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Soc-Fi: Sociological Fiction

12/18/2019

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We asked members to share their favorite works of fiction that illustrate sociological theory in particularly evocative ways. Below are the submissions of Soc-Fi we received.

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Book Symposium: The Crisis of Expertise, by Gil Eyal

12/18/2019

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Elizabeth Popp Berman
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Stephanie Mudge
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Steven Epstein
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Gianpaolo Baiocchi
A group of scholars gathered at the Social Science History Association meetings in Chicago to discuss Professor Gil Eyal’s most recent book. That discussion and Prof. Eyal’s response are published below.

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Recent Member PUblications - Fall 2019

12/18/2019

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Social Progress and Social Decay: THe promise and perils of solidarity

7/5/2019

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​Marion Fourcade
University of California, Berkeley [1] 

“Researchers in the sciences of society are bound up with the human equipment of life together: their intervention is not limited to observing and modelling but contributes unfailingly to the elaboration of this equipment in virtue of the systematic viewpoint they adopt.” (Thévenot, 2007, p243)
For the past two years, I have been having an on and off conversation with my colleague Christopher Muller on the topic of solidarity, a concept made salient by recent political shifts in the US and throughout the world [2]. Metaphors of societies infected by pathological organisms, fraying at the seams, imploding from the center, or on the verge of erupting into open conflict easily fill our disciplinary imagination as we try to make sense of the contemporary social and political environment. Our times feel unusually precarious and unpredictable, roiled by economic and technological disruption, widespread defiance and divisiveness, and shifting power plays across the globe. What is it that will hold individuals and groups together in the future?

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    ​Fall 2020 Content

    Letter from the Chair

    Teaching Theory:
    Washington University
    ​UCLA

    Decolonizing Theory

    Research Spotlights:
    Alexander C. Sutton
    Hanisah Binte Abdullah Sani

    New ASA Section

    ​Recent Publications

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    ​Abigail Cary Moore
    Anne Taylor​

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