Spring 2017 Colloquia
All Colloquia are held 3:30-5:00 pm with Reception to follow unless otherwise noted*. Locations listed below.
Schedule subject to change.
View more info on our Events page.
January 19, 2017
“Chains of Power and their Representation”
Isaac Ariail Reed
Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia
Location: Robertson Hall Room 258, *reception to follow in Randall Hall 212
This presentation explores the relationship between action, interpretation, and power, and offers a reformulation of the sociological concepts of power and authority. Several different areas of sociological research are considered, leading to a proposal for a research program in the comparative study of power-authority.
February 9, 2017
“A Living Place: Atmosphere and the Uncanny in Home Museums”
Irit Dekel
Visiting Lecturer of Israel Studies, University of Virginia
Location: Robertson Hall Room 258
A dark room, a cane, a nightgown on a bed: these are presented in home museums in Israel and Germany, of famous men and one woman. Such scenes are made to appear authentic through the mediation of objects assembly and stories, which make them relatable to the visitors but also strange and estranging, or uncanny. In the article from which the presentation is drawn, co-written with Vered Vinitzky-Serrousi, we show under what circumstances the familiarity of home becomes unknown and how this enables the particular construction of authentic experience of self-situated visitors at home, through what we term temporal multitude, linking the personal stories of big men with historical narratives and their interpretation. Further, these museums create a national memory atmosphere in which specific national narratives are experienced as personal, thus stabilizing relations between individuals and national memory. At the same time they keep those memories multidimensional, multidirectional and open to revisiting.
February 16, 2017
Master's Colloquium
Location: Robertson Hall 258
Presenters:
Mary-Collier Wilks
Activist, Entrepreneur, or Caretaker: Negotiating Varieties of Women’s Development
Advisor: Jennifer Bair
Sarah Johnson
Hybridizing Feminism in and through Popular Culture
Advisor: Andrea Press
Pilar Plater
Female Authority Reconceptualized
Advisor: Allison Pugh
Elissa Zeno
Reproductive Futures in Action: Reconciling the Divergent Timelines of Work, Motherhood,
and Reproduction
Advisor: Sarah Corse
March 16, 2017
"The Social and Organizational Origins of Scientific Knowledge"
John Parker
Senior Honors Fellow, Barrett Honors College,
Arizona State University
Location: Monroe Hall Room 122
March 23, 2017
"Mother's Employment Patterns and Consequences for Adolescent Outcomes"
Alexandra Killewald
Professor of Sociology, Harvard University
(Sponsored by National Marriage Project)
Location: Minor Hall 125
Previous research on maternal employment and its consequences for children has disproportionately examined either current employment status or the employment patterns of new mothers. I instead draw on the life course perspective and conceptualize maternal careers as long-term patterns with cumulative consequences for children’s well-being. First, I document common employment patterns of American mothers over the first 18 years of maternity and describe distinctions that emerge only by separating full-time and part-time employment and by considering employment as a long-term trajectory. Second, I describe the family, economic, and attitudinal characteristics associated with each maternal employment pattern. Finally, I estimate the consequences of maternal employment during childhood for adolescent education and health outcomes.
April 6, 2017
"Durkheimians Transformed: East-Central European Perspectives"
Joanna Wawrzyniak
Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw
Location: Robertson Hall 258
At the turn of the twentieth century, the Durkheimians proposed one of the most ambitious sociological projects ever conceived in social sciences. According to older narratives of the history of sociology, after the Great War, the school retreated and decayed. In more recent accounts, however, several authors stressed the intellectual metamorphoses of Durkheimianism and its survival in fields of growing specialization and in disciplines other than sociology. Some argue that that the Durkheimian legacy was actually saved outside of France, not because of its direct transfer but rather due to the ‘meshing of scholarly networks’, movements and ideas. The core of my lecture is organized around the sociology of a Polish scholar, Stefan Czarnowski (1879-1937), who was the member of the inner circle of the Durkheimians and whose work on the cult of St. Patrick in Ireland is still considered one of the classics in the studies of religion. His sociology—despite its changing focus from religions and nations to the rise of global capitalism— argued against race studies and anti-social concepts of culture characteristic of his time. In their stead, he called for sociologically grounded comparative world history ordered around the concepts of class and work. More generally, his unexpected reconfiguration of Durkheimianism into Marxist critique in the specific case of East-Central Europe calls for a deeper, contextual historicization in the studies of the Durkheimian school as a movement in international social sciences.
April 20, 2017
"The Importance of Being Agnes: Locating Harold Garfinkel’s Case Study in Historical Context"
Kristen Schilt
Associate Professor, The University of Chicago
Location: Robertson Hall 258
In this talk, I present preliminary work from a book-in-progress about Harold Garfinkel’s 1967 chapter about Agnes, a piece of research now widely understood to be the first sociological case study of a transitioning person. Much like Freud’s classic studies of Dora and the Wolf Man, Garfinkel’s writings about Agnes have captured the imagination of social psychologists, feminist social scientists, queer theorists, and transgender studies scholars alike, as evidenced by the continued re-interpretation of Garfinkel’s case material over the last fifty years. Drawing on newly discovered archival materials, I bring Garfinkel’s research with Agnes back into the historical context of the emerging disciplines of sex and gender and the field of sociology in the late 1950s.