Colloquia

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…

Reckoning with Race: Fluidity, Invention, and 'Reality'
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…

“You Can’t Always Test What You Want: But if you try…you test what you need”
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…

“Proletarian Lives: Ideas, Routines, and Activism in a Poor People’s Movement”
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…

“Vertical Direction and the Social Control of Medical Mistakes”
How will an external threat from Asia affect racial relations in the United States? While Americans' sense of shared adversity during the COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to unite people across racial and national lines, research also suggests that perception of threat increases racially biased behaviors and may have spillover effects on intergroup relations. Using an experiment that combines behavioral game and survey methods (N = 1,987), we…

“Assessing the Spillover Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Intergroup Relations”
Colorism, the practice whereby light skin is privileged over dark, has been widely acknowledged and studied among African Americans and Latinx populations. Though this research has grown exponentially in recent decades, less attention has been given to Asian Americans, for whom colorism is equally pervasive and deeply entrenched. This talk focuses on colorism among Asian American women and the twin pressures for light skin stemming from (1) the…

"Fair and Lovely: Colorism and Asian American Women"
From California to China, self-described “greening” efforts claiming to address inequality and the climate crisis proliferate. But why are such projects—undertaken in the name of ecological sustainability and climate resilience as well as quality of life—being carried out in such a wide range of places with very different histories, ecologies, and cultural repertoires for urban life? Based on a study of a century of greening in Germany’s Ruhr…

"The Greening Imaginary: Urbanized Nature from Garden Cities to Climate Justice"
We know remarkably little about the varying meanings justice-involved populations assign to their employment experiences, and how those meanings intersect with varying criminal involvement over time. Some perspectives assume that employment and crime are alternative choices that don’t easily co-exist, particularly as the individual moves down a pathway towards desistance. Other scholars view employment and income-generating crime as more-or-less…

"Meanings of Employment in the Lives of the Formerly Incarcerated"
In this presentation, we will discuss the troubled past (and present) of fat stigma. We will consider the role of racism and sexism in its creation and perpetuation throughout the Western world. The presentation will highlight the role of the medical field in its more recent propagation. Sabrina Strings, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Sociology and Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. Sabrina has been featured in dozens…

"Fatphobia as Misogynoir: Gender, Race, and Weight Stigma"
This talk offers an historical sociology of militarized policing in the US and Britain, where the model of our current “civil police” was born. It explores the deep historical roots of militarized policing, its causes, and its inextricable connections with empire abroad and racial dynamics at home. Julian Go is Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, where he is also a member of the Committee on International Relations, a Faculty…

"Militarizing the Police: Empire and the Global Color Line"
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