Colloquia

Thirty years into a purported culture war, evidence for the ideological polarization of popular tastes and lifestyles remains inconclusive. And yet, the degree to which ideological antipathy has spilled over into otherwise mundane realms of social life is central not only for key sociological insights about societal cohesion, but also for the existence of a functioning democratic society. Relying on original survey data on political ideology and…

In the U.S., those who identify as Afro-Latinx, do so at the intersection of a Latinx community that often rejects them and an African American community that often does not understand them. I examine the relationship between Afro-Latinx identity and the #BlackLivesMatter movement via social media. By employing, a combination of Twitter analysis and in-depth interviews with social media users, I provide insight into how Afro-Latinxs understand…

News framing contests are a central feature of Twitter, which is unsurprising given the unique ways that Twitter users engage with news. Twitter users are far more likely to use the platform to follow breaking news stories, directly follow reporters, and to engage with political news than Facebook users. At the same time, news personnel use Twitter as a source of news stories and to connect with interlocutors. Previous research has attempted to…

Megan Steele is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Georgia. Her primary research interests include the Family, Life Course, and Aging; Crime, Law, and Deviance; and Advanced Quantitative Methods. Her dissertation is tentatively titled, “A Test of Competing Pathways to Young Adulthood Violence.” In this work, she examines how factors associated with six theories of criminal behavior relate to intimate partner…

Sociology is at the top of the list of academic underappreciated academic disciplines. As a consequence, sociologists, and their expertise, are overlooked in the development of strategic plans and crises mitigation doomed to fail if the people part of the model is not properly scoped or specified. Examples are many as human behavior, especially contingent, interactive, and aggregate human behavior, the focus of sociology, over and over again,…

This project examines the methods used to test status characteristics and expectation states theory (SC-EST). Specifically, this project examines two things: (1) if the classic SC-EST laboratory experiment can be moved online; (2) if the tasks used in SC-EST experiments are equivalent at measuring gender-based discrimination. We find that the SC-EST education manipulation produces equivalent results in the online and laboratory environment,…

*Sponsored by the Georgia Workshop on Culture, Power and History and the Willson Center for Humanities & Arts