| Announcements |
| Job Postings | |
The University of Oregon, Department of Sociology, seeks to hire an assistant professor of sociology with expertise in culture, digital media and/or technology, broadly defined. The ideal candidate will have a record of methodologically rigorous scholarship, a commitment to institutional diversity, equity, and inclusion, and a dedication to inclusive teaching. Find more information about the position here: https://careers.uoregon.edu/en-us/job/531916/assistant-professor-of-sociology The Department of Sociology at University of Amsterdam is seeking a postdoctoral researcher for the project “The Return of the Medici? The Global Rise of Private Museums for Contemporary Art,” which is funded by the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO) and led by Professor Olav Velthuis. The researcher will be part of program group Cultural Sociology of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR), and will as such be able to participate in activities of this research institute (e.g. research presentations, conferences, trainings/workshops). Find more information about the position here: https://www.academictransfer.com/en/329571/postdoctoral-researcher-in-sociology/ The Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Trento, Italy, is looking for a highly motivated scholar with expertise in the collection and analysis of narrative data, such as those deriving from interviews, focus groups, visual or textual documents. The selection is for a position of RTD-B, an equivalent of a tenure-track assistant professorship. We are interested in applications from candidates with an excellent teaching and research record. Details of the offer and application forms are available at: https://lavoraconnoi.unitn.it/en/bando-dr-valcomp/377-2023-dsrs Deadline: September 29th, 2023. | |
| New Books | |
Blume Oeur, Freeden, and C.J. Pascoe. 2023. Gender Replay: On Kids, Schools, and Feminism. New York University Press. Link to Gender Replay [Get 30% off at the NYU Press website using the code NYUAU30.] Barrie Thorne’s Gender Play was a landmark study of the social worlds of primary school children that sparked a paradigm shift in our understanding of how kids and the adults around them contest and reinforce gender boundaries. Thirty years later, Gender Replay celebrates and reflects on this classic, extending Thorne’s scholarship into a new and different generation. Freeden Blume Oeur and C. J. Pascoe’s new volume brings together many of the foremost scholars on youth from an array of disciplines, including sociology, childhood studies, education, gender studies, and communication studies. Together, these scholars reflect on many contemporary issues that were not covered in Thorne’s original text, exploring new dimensions of schooling, the sociology of gender, social media, and feminist theory. Over fourteen essays, the authors touch on topics such as youth resistance in the Trump era; girls and technology; the use of play to challenge oppressive racial regimes; youth activism against climate change; the importance of taking kids seriously as social actors; and mentoring as a form of feminist praxis. Gender Replay picks up where Thorne’s text left off, doing the vital work of applying her teachings to a transformed world and to new configurations of childhood. | |
| Champagne, Anne Marie and Asia Friedman (eds). 2023. Interpreting the Body: Between Meaning and Matter. Bristol University Press. Link to Interpreting the Body Written by leading social scientists working in and across a variety of analytic traditions, this ambitious, insightful volume explores interpretation as a focal metaphor for understanding the body’s influence, meaning, and matter in society. Interpreting body and embodiment in social movements, health and medicine, race, sex and gender, globalization, colonialism, education, and other contexts, the book’s chapters call into question taken-for-granted ideas of where the self, the social world, and the body begin and end. Encouraging reflection and opening new perspectives on theories of the body that cut through the classic mind/body divide, this is an important contribution to the literature on the body. | |
| Dromi, Shai and Samuel D. Stabler. 2023. Moral Minefields: How Sociologists Debate Good Science. The University of Chicago Press. Link to Moral Minefields Sociologists routinely turn on their peers with fierce criticisms not only of their empirical rigor and theoretical clarity but of their character as well. Yet despite the controversy, scholars manage to engage in thorny debates without being censured. How? In Moral Minefields, Shai M. Dromi and Samuel D. Stabler consider five recent controversial topics in sociology—race and genetics, secularization theory, methodological nationalism, the culture of poverty, and parenting practices—to reveal how moral debates affect the field. Sociologists, they show, tend to respond to moral criticism of scholarly work in one of three ways. While some accept and endorse the criticism, others work out new ways to address these topics that can transcend the criticism, while still others build on the debates to form new, more morally acceptable research. Moral Minefields addresses one of the most prominent questions in contemporary sociological theory: how can sociology contribute to the development of a virtuous society? Rather than suggesting that sociologists adopt a clear paradigm that can guide their research toward neatly defined moral aims, Dromi and Stabler argue that sociologists already largely possess and employ the repertoires to address questions of moral virtue in their research. The conversation thus is moved away from attempts to theorize the moral goods sociologists should support and toward questions about how sociologists manage the plurality of moral positions that present themselves in their studies. Moral diversity within sociology, they show, fosters disciplinary progress. | |
| Guiffre, Kathy. 2023. Outrage: The Arts and the Creation of Modernity. Stanford University Press. Link to Outrage A cultural revolution in England, France, and the United States beginning during the time of the industrial and political revolutions helped usher in modernity. This cultural revolution worked alongside the better documented political and economic revolutions to usher in the modern era of continuous revolution. Focusing on the period between 1847 and 1937, the book examines in depth six of the cultural “battles” that were key parts of this revolution: the novels of the Brontë sisters, the paintings of the Impressionists, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, the Ballets Russes production of Le Sacre du printemps, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Using contemporaneous reviews in the press as well as other historical material, we can see that these now-canonical works provoked outrage at the time of their release because they addressed critical points of social upheaval and transformation in ways that engaged broad audiences with subversive messages. This framework allows us to understand and navigate the cultural debates that play such an important role in 21st century politics. | |
| Knottnerus, David. 2023. Polar Expeditions: Discovering Rituals of Success within Hazardous Ventures. Routledge. Link to Polar Expeditions Polar Expeditions: Discovering Rituals of Success within Hazardous Ventures employs structural ritualization theory to show how rituals enriched the lives of crewmembers on 19 polar expeditions over a 100-year period. David Knottnerus identifies and compares failed, successful, and extremely successful missions in terms of participation in ritual practices and the social psychological health of crews, finding that that social and personal rituals, such as work practices, games and sporting activities, religious practices, birthday parties, special dinners, or taking walks are extremely important in increasing crewmembers’ ability to cope with the challenges they face including extreme dangers, isolation, restricted environment, stress, lengthy journeys, and quite importantly the disruption of those practices that define our everyday lives. Besides contributing to our knowledge about polar expeditions, this research yields implications for our understanding of ritual dynamics in other situations such as disasters, refugee camps, nursing homes, traumatic experiences, and a new type of hazardous venture, space exploration. | |
| Yazdiha, Hajar. 2023. The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement. Princeton University Press. Link to The Struggle for the People’s King [Use the promo code P321 for 30% off at Princeton University Press] In the post–civil rights era, wide-ranging groups have made civil rights claims that echo those made by Black civil rights activists of the 1960s, from people with disabilities to women’s rights activists and LGBTQ coalitions. Increasingly since the 1980s, white, right-wing social movements, from family values coalitions to the alt-right, now claim the collective memory of civil rights to portray themselves as the newly oppressed minorities. The Struggle for the People’s King reveals how, as these powerful groups remake collective memory toward competing political ends, they generate offshoots of remembrance that distort history and threaten the very foundations of multicultural democracy. In the revisionist memories of white conservatives, gun rights activists are the new Rosa Parks, antiabortion activists are freedom riders, and antigay groups are the defenders of Martin Luther King’s Christian vision. Drawing on a wealth of evidence ranging from newspaper articles and organizational documents to television transcripts, press releases, and focus groups, Hajar Yazdiha documents the consequential reimagining of the civil rights movement in American political culture from 1980 to today. She shows how the public memory of King and civil rights has transformed into a vacated, sanitized collective memory that evades social reality and perpetuates racial inequality. Powerful and persuasive, The Struggle for the People’s King demonstrates that these oppositional uses of memory fracture our collective understanding of who we are, how we got here, and where we go next. | |
| New Articles | |
Foster, Jordan, Pettinicchio, David, Maroto, Michelle, Holmes, Andy, & Lukk, Martin. 2023. “Trading Blame: Drawing Boundaries around the Righteous, Deserving and Vulnerable in Times of Crisis,” Sociology. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/00380385221137181 Issar, Shiv. 2023. “The Social Construction of Algorithms in Everyday Life: Examining TikTok Users’ Understanding of the Platform’s Algorithm,” International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2023.2233138 | |
section CULTURE 