Colloquia

Join us for an Active Learning Workshop that is tailored to the Department of Sociology's specific needs. While intended for Sociology faculty and graduate students, all who teach or are planning on teaching in the future would benefit from participating. This workshop will be led by Dr. Ching-Yu Huang who, as Associate Director for Active Learning Initiatives, oversees development and implementation of active learning instructional development…

This talk will highlight and discuss the importance of intersectionality when examining racism at a HPWI (historically, predominately white institution). Black undergraduate women experience both racism and sexism simultaneously, or what Black feminists call gendered racism. HPWI’s are white-centric spaces but are also sites for patriarchy and male domination. Higher education scholars and race scholars must shift the discourse intersectionality…

In February, 2020, when COVID-19 infections had started to spread globally, the World Health Organization warned against an accompanying “massive infodemic.” In the months that followed misinformation and conspiracies regarding COVID spread like wildfire and critically impacted healthcare provision all across the world. These misinformation and conspiracies also led to widespread calls to urgently tackle the growing anti-science attitudes and,…

Young Americans expect to form egalitarian partnerships in which both partners work for pay and perform unpaid housework and childcare. Yet, working couples’ realities often deviate from this ideal, with women trading off paid work to take on unpaid family care. Will contemporary young professionals in different-gender relationships repeat this pattern, or will they follow different trajectories as they launch and build careers, maintain…

This workshop is open to graduate students and investigators who have never submitted or successfully competed for internal and external grant applications. Attendants will learn the basic principles of grant writing, funder prospecting, as well as evaluation.

The notion of race as a social construct, rather than an objective physical reality, has increasingly made inroads in the United States in recent years. Yet even in quarters where it seems most widely accepted and familiar, it has hit roadblocks. After a brief discussion of the idea of race as socially constructed, I will describe and dissect three areas in which it seems to have been difficult to apply: genetic and biomedical research; debates…

In research, you can’t always test what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you can test what you need to. What do you do when you are theory testing and aren’t yet able to directly test the mechanisms you want to test? This presentation explores a series of setbacks in figuring out how to test a new theoretical research program. This talk also discusses the transitions in a theoretical research project that originally set…

What are the political consequences, at the grassroots level, of working-class decline? Based on multi-year ethnographic fieldwork on the Unemployed Workers' Movement in Argentina, this presentation provides a case study of how workers affected by job loss protect their traditional forms of life by joining progressive community organizations. Life history interviews and participant observation show that a key appeal of this movement is the…

How doctors police mistakes among themselves varies. Physicians support, tolerate, avoid, ridicule, confront, report, and banish colleagues for errors. What explains this variation? An established theory of social control and a growing literature on stratification in medical education suggest that the vertical direction of medical cases may partially account for the different social control strategies physicians use to manage mistakes. Drawing…

Dr. Ruth Poproski from the Center for Teaching and Learning will lead a teaching workshop on inclusive teaching. Attendants will learn about the primary principles of incorporating inclusion, diverse perspectives, and advancing equity in the classroom, as well as challenges that arise in light of these goals. Participants will develop strategies to better engage with students in inclusive and equitable dialogue, thus developing the knowledge…