The Wuhan Lockdown: A Discussion about COVID-19 in China and the US
Theory, History, Society (THiS) Book Boom Series
via Yan Long:
The COVID-19 pandemic had brought many countries—including the first and second most powerful economies in the world—to their knees. In this online panel, five sociologists will discuss Guobin Yang’s book The Wuhan Lockdown and reflect on what has happened, what has changed, and what we can expect about the post-COVID world.
Speakers:
Claire Decoteau (University of Illinois Chicago)
Jun Jin (Tsinghua University)
Yan Long (University of California, Berkeley)
Bin Xu (Emory University)
Moderator：
Fei Yan (Tsinghua University)
Date:
Dec 4th, 7:00 ET
Zoom webinar ID: 944 4782 3758 (https://umich.zoom.us/w/94447823758/)
For questions or comments, please contact Yan Long (longyan@berkeley.edu)
Socio-Economic Review Cafe: Close Relationships, Trust, and the Economy
Featuring a conversation with SER authors Wenjuan Zheng (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), David Shulman (Lafayette College) and Kent Grayson (Northwestern University)
Join us for a discussion of close relationships and the potential and pitfalls of trust in the economy, as well as the ways technology can mediate these dynamics. Shulman and Grayson’s paper “Et Tu, Brute? Unraveling the puzzle of deception and broken trust in close relations” (2023) discusses why closeness, as with friends or coworkers, is no guarantee of trust, revisiting theoretical discussions of trust to shed light on detection errors and associational dilemmas. Meanwhile, Zheng’s paper “Converting donation to transaction: how platform capitalism exploits relational labor in non-profit fundraising” (2023) investigates what happens when platforms intermediate trusting relationships, demonstrating how they reconfigure charity events and mediate civic interactions through invisible value extraction.
Together, these papers offer insights into how trust is built, maintained, and challenged in a world increasingly facilitated by technology.
The event will take place on Thursday, November 16th, at 9AM PST/12PM EST/6PM CET. Register at this link!
As with all SER Cafe events, we will facilitate a dynamic conversation with the authors rather than lengthy talks. Come ready to engage.
Assistant Professor of Sociology (Gender/Feminisms, Ethnography, and the Global South)
The Department of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is accepting applications for a tenure-track assistant or associate professor position to begin September 1, 2024. The preferred candidate will be an advanced assistant professor. Under exceptional circumstances, highly qualified candidates at other ranks may receive consideration.
This position requires a specialization in Gender/Feminisms, Ethnography, and the Global South. The department has a strong preference for scholars whose work takes a transnational or global approach that focuses on Black, Indigenous, and/or Latinx critiques and communities and includes Global South locations. Candidates should have a demonstrated track record of outstanding academic or creative scholarship, as well as evidence of excellence in teaching and a commitment to service. The selected candidate will typically teach a 12-hour credit load, advise undergraduate and graduate students, and perform service duties for the Department, College, and University. If hired at a senior rank, they will also be expected to help mentor their colleagues.
Assistant Professor of Sociological Theory, Department of Sociology & Criminal Justice
QUALIFICATIONS AND RESPONSIBILITIES: The University of Delaware invites applications for a tenure-track position in sociological theory at the rank of Assistant Professor, to begin August 16, 2024. The Department seeks scholars whose expertise advances knowledge of sociological theory through research and/or teaching. Additional areas of specialization are open. The preferred candidate will hold a Ph.D. in Sociology or a related discipline. We also seek a colleague whose teaching, research, and service will support and advance UD’s core values of diversity and inclusive excellence.
SOCIOLOGY AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE AT UD: The Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware (https://www.soc.udel.edu) is within the College of Arts and Sciences. The Department offers bachelors degrees in sociology and criminal justice, and masters and doctoral degrees in sociology and criminology. While the department has degree programs in both sociology and criminology and a multidisciplinary faculty, it proudly and successfully operates as a unified entity in which there is a strong culture of shared governance. The department is committed to rigorous interdisciplinary teaching and research as well as scholarship that values and advances the public good. The department has specialized interests in Race, Gender, Criminology, Law & Society, Health, Theory, and Disasters & the Environment, and the faculty have expertise in both qualitative and quantitative research design and methodologies. Many faculty members have relationships or joint appointments with other academic units across campus, including Africana Studies, Women and Gender Studies, the Center for the Study of Diversity, and the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration. Moreover, the department includes the Center for Drug and Health Studies, and department faculty are affiliated with such centers as the Disaster Research Center and the Center for the Study and Prevention of Gender-Based Violence. Extramural research support in the department is among the highest in the College’s social sciences portfolio, with faculty pursuing active and productive research programs.
TO APPLY: Review of applications will begin on December 15, 2023 and continue until the position is filled. Applicants should upload a cover letter, research statement, teaching statement, and a current CV at http://www.udel.edu/careers. Letters of reference and additional material will be requested of the semi-finalists. For further information, please contact the search committee chair, Dr. Ann V. Bell, at avbell@udel.edu. All possible discretion will be exercised to maintain the privacy of applicants through the search process.
Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (2024-2025)
Via Angele Christin:
The following information applies to applications for the 2024-25 cohort of postdoctoral fellows. The application cycle for this cohort will open on November 16, 2023 and will close on January 15, 2024.
The Digital Civil Society Lab brings promising new scholars to Stanford University for 1 year appointments (renewable once, for a total of two years) as postdoctoral fellows. Each fellow will be primarily affiliated with the Digital Civil Society Lab, and potentially cross-affiliated with a department or school at Stanford University depending on the fellow’s specific disciplinary focus.
The annual fellowship stipend is $75,000 plus the standard benefits that postdoctoral fellows at Stanford University receive, including health insurance and travel funds. The fellowship program falls under U.S. Immigration J-1 Exchange Visitor Visa activities.
The start date of the fellowship will be September 2024, unless otherwise agreed. To assume a postdoctoral fellowship, scholars must have a PhD in hand by July 1, 2024. We cannot consider applications from scholars who earned a PhD earlier than September 1, 2021.
We encourage applications from candidates representing a broad range of disciplines including the social sciences, humanities, law, computer science and engineering.
The Journal of Political Power is accepting submissions.
Via Selina Gallo-Cruz:
The Journal of Political Powerwas established in 2008 to provide an interdisciplinary venue for focused studies and scholarly debates surrounding the origins, development, and application of power in contemporary society. The journal’s contributions have thus far drawn together scholars from diverse fields of inquiry to ask new questions about the enduring relevance of classical studies of power.
We welcome empirical and theoretical work on the diverse arenas in which power can be understood including: class and class relations, culture and cultural systems, gender, globalization and international relations, institutions and institutional change, ethnicity, nationalism and the nation-state, politics, race and racism, and violence and war.
Special issues welcome! Open access available.
Read the Instructions for Authors for information on how to submit your article.
Recent Publications by Members:
Aliza Luft: “The Moral Career of the Genocide Perpetrator: Cognition, Emotions, and Dehumanization as a Consequence, Not a Cause, of Violence.” Sociological Theory.
Scholars have long argued that dehumanization causes violence. However, others have recently argued that those who harm do so because they feel pressured or view violence as justified. Examining the Rwandan genocide, this article contends that contradictory theories of dehumanization can be reconciled through consideration of cultural and moral sociology. Research on culture and action demonstrates that when people strive to implement new practices, they often explicitly work through them cognitively and emotionally. With time, however, these conscious processes diminish until actions that were once new proceed with ease. In another vein, morality research suggests our affective responses to actions indicate their moral significance; when we do not react emotionally to actions, they are morally irrelevant. Herein, I combine these ideas with a temporal analysis of Hutus’ recollections of killing Tutsi and find cognitive, emotional, and relational transformations rendered killing mundane over time. Dehumanization was a consequence of violence, not a cause.
Jonathon Leader Maynard and Aliza Luft. “Humanizing dehumanization research.” Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology.
This essay contends that contemporary research should pay greater attention to three fundamentally human characteristics of dehumanization. First, we argue that scholars need to better consider and analyze the ideological context of dehumanization, specifically the multiple meanings that diverse cultural conceptions of the human and the dehumanized impart to dehumanizing concepts or attitudes. Second, we urge a greater emphasis on how social relationships influence dehumanization, recognizing that people are entangled in complex and intersecting social identities, relationships, and histories that affect how they respond to the dehumanizing intentions of others. Third, we argue that the institutional context of dehumanization must be investigated and theorized, as dehumanization’s effects are rarely the result of atomized individuals reacting to diffuse dehumanizing rhetoric but rather the result of collective action within more or less formal organizations. These tasks can be accomplished through increased interdisciplinarity, thereby enhancing the insights and applicability of dehumanization research to the numerous forms of conflict, brutality, and extremism that are so frequently associated with dehumanization.
Blume Oeur, Freeden, and Candice Robinson. Online First. “Strangely Hesitant about Antiblackness: A Comment on Quadlin and Montgomery.” Social Psychology Quarterly. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/01902725231204877.
Abstract: We raise concerns about Quadlin and Montgomery’s Social Psychology Quarterly article, “When a Name Gives You Pause,” a study of whether racialized names affect the time to dog adoption in a county shelter. Our comment is guided by the recent insistence of American Sociological Association leadership for greater critical introspection in sociological research. First, the study is ahistorical by overlooking histories of human-animal relations and naming in the construction of anti-Blackness. Second, the study is acontextual by contorting labor market research and color-blind perspectives in a manner that directs undue attention to the treatment of dogs without specifying the concrete disadvantages for Black people. The study’s narrow focus on adopters misrepresents organizational factors within animal shelters. These various oversights invest Quadlin and Montgomery’s article in a whiteness-centered sociological tradition. We urge divesting from this tradition and conclude with a call for sociology to be more educative and reflexive.
Apryl Williams. Not My Type: Automating Sexual Racism in Online Dating (in print with Stanford University Press on Feb 6, 2024) is available for preorder: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/not-my-type-apryl-williams/1143054243?ean=9781503635050
Skarpelis, A.K.M. 2023. “Horror Vacui: Racial Misalignment, Symbolic Repair, and Imperial Legitimation in German National Socialist Portrait Photography.” American Journal of Sociology 129 (2): 313-383.
Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascism, the War, and Structures of Feeling in Italy, 1943-1945: Tales in Chiaroscuro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).
On July 25, 1943, news of Mussolini’s resignation and subsequent arrest stunned Italians leaving them dumbfounded. After two decades, fascism had fallen without any advance warning. As festive events marked the incredible outcome and reminders of the past were destroyed, an uncontainable joy seemed to pervade Italians. But what did people actually celebrate? How did they understand the bygone dictatorship, which was soon to be reincarnated in the Italian Social Republic (RSI)? Drawing on more than one hundred diaries written by ordinary citizens (and prominent figures as well) and inspired by Raymond Williams’s concept of structures of feeling, the book assesses how Italians confronted their present and negotiated their past during the two years from the fall of the regime to the definitive defeat of the RSI and the end of the world war in May 1945. By bringing to life the cultural imaginaries and practices of the past, the book raises ostensibly intractable questions on the epochal impact of what often appears as inconsequential: the typically unseen and seemingly banal power of everyday experiences.
Jessi Streib: The Accidental Equalizer: How Luck Determines Pay After College. (Chicago: Chicago University Press).
A startling discovery—that job market success after college is largely random—forces a reappraisal of education, opportunity, and the American dream.
As a gateway to economic opportunity, a college degree is viewed by many as America’s great equalizer. And it’s true: wealthier, more connected, and seemingly better-qualified students earn exactly the same pay as their less privileged peers. Yet, the reasons why may have little to do with bootstraps or self-improvement—it might just be dumb luck. That’s what sociologist Jessi Streib proposes in The Accidental Equalizer, a conclusion she reaches after interviewing dozens of hiring agents and job-seeking graduates.
Streib finds that luck shapes the hiring process from start to finish in a way that limits class privilege in the job market. Employers hide information about how to get ahead and force students to guess which jobs pay the most and how best to obtain them. Without clear routes to success, graduates from all class backgrounds face the same odds at high pay. The Accidental Equalizer is a frank appraisal of how this “luckocracy” works and its implications for the future of higher education and the middle class. Although this system is far from eliminating American inequality, Streib shows that it may just be the best opportunity structure we have—for better and for worse.
Mijs, Jonathan J.B., Nikki Huang and William Regan. 2023. “Confronting Racism of Omission. Experimental Evidence of the Impact of Information about Ethnic and Racial Inequality in the United States and the Netherlands.” Du Bois Review doi: 10.1017/S1742058X23000140 (open access)
section CULTURE 