Hello Culture Section members!

I have the great honor and pleasure to begin this Letter from the Chair by announcing this year’s Sociology of Culture Section Election winners and the Section Awards winners. I will also briefly report on the activities of the Culture Section since our March 2023 Newsletter. Our hard-working Newsletter Committee and Editors have put together another fantastic Newsletter, and I hope you will all enjoy reading it. Thank you to Hannah Wohl (Communications Committee Chair) and Newsletter Committee members Lisa McCormick, Ann Mullen, Jennifer Dudley, Anne Marie Champagne, and Derek Robey (webmaster), and Newsletter Editors, Elizabeth Trudeau (lead Editor for this issue), Man Yao, and Manning Zhang.

In this Newsletter, you will find information about our Culture Section Election Results and Awards winners, and all the Culture Section events at the upcoming 2023 ASA Annual Meeting. Our “Four Questions with…” Series has Anne Marie Champagne (Newsletter Committee) interviewing Asia Friedman on her past research and hot-off-the-press books, Mammography Wars: Analyzing Attention in cultural and Medical Disputes (Rutgers University Press) and coedited volume Interpreting the Body: Between Meaning and Matter (Bristol University Press). Oded Marom reviews Gary Alan Fine’s latest book Fair Share: Senior Activism, Tiny Publics, and the Culture of Resistance (University of Chicago Press). We have a report on the Culture and Contemporary Life Series Panel by Manning Zhang (Newsletter Editor). We close the newsletter with a set of announcements sourced by Hannah Wohl (Communications Committee Chair).

Sociology of Culture Section Election Results

We are fortunate to have a slate of fantastic incoming Section leaders. Congratulations to all incoming Section leaders!

Chair-Elect
Clayton Childress, University of Toronto
(1-year term begins in 2023)

Chief Operating Officer
Ming-Cheng M. Lo, University of California, Davis
(3-year term begins in 2023)

Council Members
Michaela DeSoucey, North Carolina State University
Natasha Warikoo, Tufts University
Laura K. Nelson, University of British Columbia
(3-year term begins in 2023)

Student Council Representative
Yesenia Vargas, University of Illinois at Chicago
(2-year term begins in 2023)

A big Thank You to everyone who was willing to run for office in the Culture Section this year, and for their commitment to the Section. 

Sociology of Culture Section Awards

Our Culture Section awards committees have been hard at work reading all submissions and making selections. I’m delighted to announce the award winners for the Mary Douglas Award for Best Book, the Clifford Geertz Award for Best Article, and the Richard A. Peterson Award for Best Student Paper below.

Mary Douglas Award for Best Book

Co-winners:

Karen A. Cerulo and Janet M. Ruane, 2022. Dreams of a Lifetime: How Who We Are Shapes How We Imagine the Future. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Raúl Pérez, 2022. The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Honorable Mention: 

Noah Amir Arjomand, 2022. Fixing Stories: Local Newsmaking and International Media in Turkey and Syria. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Committee Members: Terry McDonnell (Chair), Waverly Duck, Rebecca Jean Emigh, Amin Ghaziani, Fatma Gocek, Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz.

Clifford Geertz Award for Best Article

Winner: 

Gary J. Adler Jr., Daniel DellaPosta and Jane Lankes, 2022. “Aesthetic Style: How Material Objects Structure an Institutional Field.” Sociological Theory 40(1): 51-81.   

Honorable Mention:

Eric W. Schoon, 2022. “Operationalizing Legitimacy.” American Sociological Review 87(3): 478-503.

Committee Members: Iddo Tavory (Chair), Sharon Quinsaat, Jeff Sheng, Christina Simko, Yongren Shi, Talia Shiff.

Richard A. Peterson Award for Best Student Paper

Co-winners:

Tomás Gold, 2022. “Contentious Tactics as Jazz Performances: A Pragmatist Approach to the Study of Repertoire Change.” Sociological Theory 40(3): 249-271.

Turgut Keskintürk, 2022. “Religious belief alignment: The structure of cultural beliefs from adolescence to emerging adulthood.” Poetics 90: 101591.

Honorable Mention:

Sarah Larissa Combellick, 2023. “‘My Baby Went Straight to Heaven’: Morality Work in Abortion Online Storytelling.” Social Problems 70(1): 87-103.

Committee Members: Paul Joosse (Chair), Elisabeth Becker, Matteo Bortolini, Larissa Buchholz, Jun Fang, Meltem Odabas.

Congratulations to all the Culture Section Awards winners!

Thank you to all Culture Section Award Committee Members and Chairs for all of your work on these committees!

ASA Annual Meeting

We are fast approaching the 2023 ASA Annual Meeting, taking place on August 17-21 in Philadelphia. The conference program is already available online, and chair-elect Monika Krause and Programming Committee members Fabien Accominotti, Guillermina Altomonte, Omar Lizardo, Jaimie Morse, and Derron Wallace have put together an exciting set of section sessions. Below you’ll find information about our sessions. For full conference program information, please visit the online program on the ASA website.

We have exciting news about our Culture Section Reception at the 2023 ASA Annual Meeting. Thanks to the hard work of Reception Committee members Cresa Pugh (Chair) and Alexander Hoppe, we will have an off-site Reception, with an open bar and food. This will be a joint reception with the Theory Section on Sunday, August 20, the designated Culture Section Day for this year’s ASA conference. The reception will be at Ladder 15 (1528 Sansom Street), a short walk from the Pennsylvania Convention Center. Please mark your calendars!

Sociology of Culture Section Sessions

Early Career Professionalization Panel: From Dissertation to Book (Invited Session), Sunday, August 20, 8-9am

Organizer: X. Amy Zhang, George Madison University

Section on Sociology of Culture Business Meeting, Sunday, August 20, 9-9:30am

Comparative and International Perspectives on Race and Culture (Invited Session, co-sponsored by Sociology of Culture and Race, Gender, Class), Sunday, August 20, 10-11:30am

Organizer: Derron Wallace, Brandeis University         

Cultures of Expertise: Mediating Global Challenges, Sunday, August 20, 2-3:30pm

Organizer: Monika Christine Krause, London School of Economics

Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtable, Sunday, August 20, 4-5:30pm

Organizer: Guillermina Altomonte, New York University

Modeling Cultures (co-sponsored by Sociology of Culture and Mathematical Sociology), Monday, August 21, 8-9:30am            

Organizers: Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, University of California-San Diego and Ronald L. Breiger, University of Arizona

Culture and the State, Monday, August 21, 10-11:30am

Organizer: Fiona Greenland, University of Virginia

The Sociology of Art and Art Institutions, Monday, August 21, 12-1:30pm            

Organizer: Patricia A. Banks, Mount Holyoke College

Membership Committee

The Membership Committee (Marshall A. Taylor (Chair), Thomas Davidson, Asia Friedman, Khoa Phan Howard, Samantha Leonard, and Amy Zhang (council liaison) have been working on the Culture Section’s Mentorship Program. They have already formed the new mentoring pods and are contacting mentors and mentees this week to let them know.

Culture and Contemporary Life Series

Since our previous Newsletter, the Culture and Contemporary Life (CCL) Series has had two fantastic panels. The CCL Committee (Fiona Greenland (chair), Annie Hikido, Michael O. Johnston, Miray Philips, Ana Velitchkova, and Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra (council liaison) have once again brought together two excellent sets of scholars to discuss important social issues.

On March 1, we had a session on “Belligerent Nationalism in Big Power Politics,” with a standout lineup of panelists with Olga Shevchenko (Williams College), Andreas Wimmer (Columbia University), and Xiaohong Xu (University of Michigan). They all relied on their respective expertise on the rise of nationalism to offer important insights on the rise of militarization and violence in the name of the nation, in particular among big powers such as Russia, China, and the United States. Anna Velitchkova (University of Mississippi) expertly moderated the panel, guiding the session with fantastic questions.

On April 17, we had a session on “Theodicy and the Problem of Meaning,” with another excellent lineup of panelists with Zeina Al Azmeh (University of Cambridge), Christina Simko (Williams College), and Biko Mandela Gray (Syracuse University). They discussed the question of theodicy and meaning and how these play out in very different contexts, relying on their respective research on the Syrian conflict, the 9/11 context and anti-Black violence in the United States. Miray Phillips (University of Minnesota) smoothly moderated the panel and probed speakers with questions about the meaning of suffering and the role of religious and secular beliefs regarding suffering.

You can read a report on the Belligerent Nationalism in Big Power Politics panel written by Manning Zhang (Newsletter Editor) for this Newsletter here. You can watch the panel on “Belligerent Nationalism in Big Power Politics” here and the panel on “Theodicy and the Problem of Meaning” here. If you want to check out older CCL sessions, you will find them all here. Thank you to all the panelists and moderator, as well as to CCL Committee for all their exceptional work on these excellent panels!

The fourth and last CCL panel of the year, on “The Body and Culture in a Post-Embodiment Age” will be scheduled in the summer.

Thank you to the lead Editor for this issue, Elizabeth Trudeau, the Newsletter editorial team, and Newsletter Committee for putting together another great issue. I hope you enjoy reading it.

We will be back with our last Newsletter of the academic year in early August, just in time for the ASA Annual Meeting.

Wishing everyone a restorative summer break!

Vanina Leschziner