Annoucement, Newsletter

Announcements

The Eastern Sociological Society held its annual meeting in February organized around the theme “Dignity and Society.” Sessions covered a wide range of topics of particular interest to scholars of culture including “Identity, Power, and Caste in Science Fiction,” “Cultural Politics,” and “Voices, Meaning, and the Media.” 

Call for Papers

Third Annual Du Boisian Scholar Network (DBSN) Virtual Gathering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, August 10 – 13, 2023.

“Globalizing Social Science of Race and Empire in Contemporary Education: Pedagogy, Performance, Praxis”

            This August, the Third Annual Du Boisian Scholar Network convening will be hosted virtually by the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. In the spirit of Du Boisian sociology, the central theme of this year is community-engaged pedagogy which specifically refers to protocols of problem formulation, data collection, analysis, and distribution, situated in the complex political agency of racialized, criminalized, disenfranchised, undocumented, and migrant communities. By teaching and learning “modernity” as a legacy of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and nationalism, this conference is a call for sharing critical interventions that leverage local and global community-engaged ways of knowing and being “human” in the classroom.

Throughout his career, W.E B DuBois engaged in love and solidarity across local and global movements, a decision which eventually led to his arrest, trial, and arraignment at the age of eighty-three. In addition to social scientific histories, and international legal briefings, DuBois wrote poetry, short stories, and fiction. By emphasizing contradictions in Du Bois’ career as a scholar, politician, and multi-media artist, this gathering takes a critical approach to the politicization of pedagogy, arguing that education for colonial subjects has always been, and will continue to be a collective means and ends toward freedom from empire, freedom to love. 

This year’s theme, “Globalizing Social Science of Race and Empire in Contemporary Education: Community-Engaged Pedagogy, Performance, Praxis,” is a response to, and denunciation of 1) contemporary censorship of critical race theory in primary and secondary schools; 2) the rising costs of higher-education; and 3) the neoliberal treatment of professional degrees as privileged commodities, to be exchanged for market value in an ‘objective’ marketplace and passed down by elites. The Gathering situates DuBois within multiple, intersectional, intramural traditions of scholar activists who articulated racism as a global, rather than national, problem. In doing so, we bring attention to DuBois’ own double-consciousness, writing across civil rights and human rights frameworks in An Appeal to the World: A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent (1947), and later, We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People (1951). 

Please consider submitting an abstract of no more than 300 words by 1 June 2023. We are accepting abstracts for four kinds of proposals: (i) visual and/or performance art; (ii) panel sessions (up to three speakers); (iii) teaching workshops; and (iv) individual papers. Monolingual and multilingual submissions are encouraged. If selected, participants will have an opportunity to contribute to a special issue in Frontiers, edited by the organizers.

At this three-day virtual conference, each day has its own theme:

1.    Day 1: “Contextualizing and Contesting DuBois” offers attendees an interdisciplinary, intersectional, international introduction to Du Boisian theory and methods, and is best fit for traditional paper presentations, panels and poster boards on work already published.

2.    Day 2: “Constructing Community-engaged Knowledge” is best suited for ongoing and unpublished work, where participants get real-time feedback on interdisciplinary and intramural course syllabi, research projects or book proposals using Du Boisian theory and methods.

3.    Day 3: “Celebrating Creative Agency” will host a visual and performing arts show, honor past and future organizers of DBSN, and announce the location of the 2024 DBSN Gathering.

Submission link can be found here. The form closes 1 June 2023 at 5pm. Potential topics include: 

  • Crime and Criminology in Colony and Post-Colony
  • Racism, Classism, Casteism and Racial Capitalism 
  • Ethnic and Black Studies 
  • National and International Law
  • War and Peace
  • Mentorship: Myths and Realities
  • Women, Gender, and Sexuality
  • Climate Change, Environmental and Reproductive Justice
  • Culture and Performance Studies 
  • Immigration, Emigration, and Migration
  • Indigenous feminisms (theory, history, and methods)
  • Pan-Africanism, Communism, Socialism, and the Nation-state
  • Orality, Testimony, and Witness
  • Comparative studies (genocide, literature, history, culture)

Poetics: Duality in the Study of Culture and Society

In light of the imminent fiftieth anniversary of “The Duality of Persons and Groups,” we seek contributions that reflect upon the importance of Breiger’s concept and offer trailblazing insights into the future by introducing new ways duality can be exploited beyond persons and groups.

Guest editors:

Special issue information:

Transcending its initial origins as the algebraic formalization of the Simmelian insight that people can be understood as intersections of the groups to which they belong, and groups intersections of their members, the concept of duality (Breiger 1974) has proven one of a “few true breakthroughs in the human sciences” (Lee and Martin 2018:28). Duality has become an effective means of resolving persistent dualisms in social-scientific thought (e.g., subject/object, culture/structure) by enabling the investigation of how seemingly opposed orders are mutually constitutive. Important lineages of research on cultural production, consumption, and evaluation are grounded in the premise that categories of persons are defined by the cultural objects (e.g., songs or films) they make or choose, and categories of cultural objects are defined by the categories of persons who make and choose them. The principle of duality underlies research illustrating how processes of coordination and polarization in political contexts can be described in terms of actors’ increasing convergence or opposition vis-à-vis sets of purposes, tactics, or beliefs. Breaking with the Weberian directive to locate cultural meanings within actors’ subjectivities, research exploiting the duality of symbol and practice illustrates how meanings are constituted within material regimes of practice. Duality provides the conceptual infrastructure for ecological theories explaining the emergence and transformation of organizational and cultural forms via reference to their competition over potential members or audiences. The duality of habit and quality serves as the foundation to John Levi Martin’s proposal for a cognitively and phenomenologically valid theory of action. Methodological work exploiting the duality of cases and variables reinterprets linear regression in such a way to move beyond the logic of counterfactualism and highlight regression’s unexpected affinities with methods drawing upon alternative logics of causal explanation. And, more recently, duality has been presented as a crucial tool for cultural analysts to interrupt the hermeneutic circle by grounding cultural meanings in relations among persons.

Proposals could address the following topics, among others:

  • Duality in cultural networks (Basov 2020; Pachucki and Breiger 2010)
  • Duality in processes of cultural production, consumption, and evaluation (Godart 2018; Goldberg 2011; Lizardo and Skiles 2016; Puetz 2017; Vlegels and Lievens 2017)
  • Duality in contentious politics (DellaPosta 2020; Fuhse, Stuhler, Riebling, and Martin 2020; Mische and Pattison 2000; Ring-Ramirez, Reynolds-Stenson, and Earl 2014)
  • The duality of symbol and practice (Mohr and Duquenne 1997; Friedland, Mohr, Roose, and Gardinali 2014; Adler, DellaPosta, and Lankes 2022)
  • Duality and ecological explanation (McPherson 1983; Mark 1998)
  • Duality and theories of action (Martin 2011)
  • The duality of cases and variables (Breiger 2009; Melamed, Breiger, and Schoon 2014; Breiger and Melamed 2015; Rambotti and Breiger 2020)

We are particularly interested in submissions that anticipate novel avenues of research by applying the concept of duality to new phenomena or use it to reimagine well-worn concepts in sociology (à la Lizardo’s [2014] work on cultural omnivorousness). Because we want to illustrate the breadth of uses to which duality can be put, we seek submissions across multiple methods and substantive areas in sociology.

Manuscript submission information:

Interested authors should submit an abstract of approximately 500 words to the guest editors at 50duality@gmail.com by July 1, 2023. The guest editors will notify the authors with their decisions by August 1, 2023.

Full papers should be submitted to Poetics by November 1, 2023. Editorial decisions will be made in accordance with Poetics’ anonymous peer review process.

New Books

Rodríguez Morató, Arturo, and Alvaro Santana-Acuña (eds.). 2022. Sociology of the Arts in Action: New Perspectives on Creation, Production, and Reception. Palgrave Macmillan.

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-11305-5

This edited collection carries out an extensive coverage of the sociology of arts’ most characteristic thematic areas (production, creation, the artwork, and reception) across an important range of artistic fields, from the most traditional to the more unusual. It makes an argument for the theoretical creativity and empirical expansion that characterizes the study of contemporary sociology of the arts. Such creativity is present in the increasingly predominant approach to a sociology of the arts in action, in all areas of inquiry within the discipline. The range of theoretical paradigms evoked is rich, analysing several of the most important theoretical frameworks currently handled in the discipline (Bourdieu, Becker, Peterson, ANT), and combining them with the works of many other influential contemporary specialists (De Nora, Hennion, Lamont, Menger and Born et al.). The book also establishes links to less known theoretical frameworks and some from different fields including economic sociology, microsociology, ethnomethodology, semiotics, and cultural history. The volume argues that Spanish-speaking scholars are now at the forefront of new developments in the field of the sociology of the arts, and is the first effort to gather research by these influential Spanish-language scholars in a single volume for an English-language audience.

Hilmar, Til. 2023. Deserved: Economic Memories after the Fall of the Iron Curtain. Columbia University Press.

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/deserved/9780231209793

After the fall of the Iron Curtain, people across the former socialist world saw their lives transformed. In just a few years, labor markets were completely disrupted, and the meanings attached to work were drastically altered. How did people who found themselves living under state socialism one day and capitalist democracy the next adjust to the changing social order and its new system of values?

Till Hilmar examines memories of the postsocialist transition in East Germany and the Czech Republic to offer new insights into the power of narratives about economic change. Despite the structural nature of economic shifts, people often interpret life outcomes in individual terms. Many are deeply attached to the belief that success and failure must be deserved. Emphasizing individual effort, responsibility, and character, they pass moral judgments based on a person’s fortunes in the job market. Hilmar argues that such frameworks represent ways of making sense of the profound economic and social dislocations after 1989. People craft narratives of deservingness about themselves and others to solve the problem of belonging in a new social order.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with engineers and care workers as well as historical and comparative analysis of the breakdown of communism in Eastern Europe, Deserved sheds new light on the moral imagination of capitalism and the experience of economic change. This book also offers crucial perspective on present-day politics, showing how notions of deservingness and moral worth have propelled right-wing populism.

New Articles

Harvey, Peter Francis. 2023. “‘Everyone Thinks They’re Special’: How Schools Teach Children Their Social Station.” American Sociological Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224231172785

Jasso, Guillermina. 2021. “The Methods and Surprises of Sociological Theory: Ideas, Postulates, Predictions, Distributions, Unification.” Pp. 17-36 in Seth Abrutyn and Omar Lizardo (eds.), Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory. New York, NY: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78205-4_2

Jasso, Guillermina. 2022. “Notes on the History of Social Science Research: In Celebration of Its 50th Anniversary.” Social Science Research. 108:102780. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2022.102780

Leader Maynard, Jonathan and Aliza Luft. 2023. “Humanizing Dehumanization Research.“ Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cresp.2023.100102 Zilberstein, Shira, Michèle Lamont, and Mari Sanchez. 2023. “Recreating a Plausible Future: Combining Cultural Repertoires in Unsettled Times.” Sociological Science. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.114890