Dear Section Members, 

Chair-Elect Clayton Childress has put together a terrific set of sessions for open submission, which you’ll find outlined below. 

Thanks to everyone who has contributed on the programme committee and as organizers.  We look forward to your submissions.  

The deadline is February 26, 2024 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern.

Before the session info, I include below a call for graduate student participants for our Grad Student Professionalization Panel at ASA, organized by Tania Aparicio. Please consider sharing your experience. 

All my best, 
Monika 

Call for graduate student participants for ASA 2024 Grad Student Professionalization Panel on “Crafting Grant Proposals”  

We are looking for an advanced graduate student who might be willing to share their experience applying for and securing research grants in next year’s Professionalization Panel (description below). If you are interested in participating, please contact Tania Aparicio (ta2727@tc.columbia.edu) by 11/30with a short description (3-5 sentences) of your experience. 

Crafting grant proposals
Panelists will share how to successfully present research projects in grant proposals. The panel will feature a range of perspectives, including grant recipients and members of selection committees.

 

Section on Sociology of Culture

Culture and Solidarity Across Difference (Co-sponsored by Section on Race, Gender, and Class) 

Audre Lorde wrote, “Our differences are polarities between which we can spark possibilities for a future we cannot even now imagine, when we acknowledge that we share a unifying vision.” The study of social difference shows us that culture shapes the politics, experiences, and outcomes of difference. However, difference can also yield new forms of culture, of bridging and interconnection through cultures of solidarity. This session draws together varied theoretical and methodological approaches and empirical cases to examine the multifold ways culture and solidarity manifest, interconnect, and act across difference. 

(Session Organizer) Hajar Yazdiha, University of Southern California 

Culture in Interactions 

Perhaps the main legacy of Howard Becker is exposing how culture is essential to social interactions. Sociologists have developed a vast conceptual arsenal to explain how interactions among individuals unfold, including processes of labeling, role performance, schematic representation, the development of “cultural styles,” field positions, and imagined futures. Many times, however, these concepts have remained disconnected from one another. This session welcomes submissions that contribute to bridging these (and other) conceptual tools to advance current sociological debates on social interactions. Papers addressing interactions at micro-, meso- and macro-level contexts are welcome, as well as papers that make new theoretical or methodological connections between different sociological understandings of what social interactions are composed of. Papers addressing culture in interactions within global or transnational contexts are especially welcome. 

(Session Organizer) Tomas Gold, University of Notre Dame 

Culture in Objects 

Culture is everywhere but is especially embodied in objects, from material forms to ideas and media content. The study of cultural objects has been a central agenda within cultural sociology. This panel seeks submissions that adopt various approaches to examine cultural objects, their aesthetic and physical properties, and their cultural power. Papers could explore the creation, production, and reception of cultural objects, both within a local context and on a global scale. We also welcome papers that emphasize material agency, investigating how the materiality of cultural objects shapes processes of meaning-making. Papers with an interdisciplinary approach and/or a global perspective are especially welcomed. 

(Session Organizer) Jun Fang, Colby College 

Culture in Organizations and Markets 

How does culture shape organizations and markets, both formal and informal? Conversely, how do organizational and market contexts influence cultural practices and meaning making? For this panel, we invite empirically grounded and theoretically innovative papers that engage with these and other questions pertaining to cultural processes in markets and organizations. We welcome all studies, regardless of theoretical orientation, methodology, region, or historical period of study. 

(Session Organizer) Anna Wozny, Princeton University & Tokyo College 

Culture in People 

Sociologists of culture have become increasingly interested in the role that the physical body—our primary interface with the social world—plays in structuring cultural experiences. At the same time, our bodies are themselves sociocultural products, continually shaped by our everyday experiences. This session welcomes submissions that contribute to sociological thinking on the role that the physical body plays in processes related to enculturation, cognition, interaction, identity, meaning making broadly construed, and perception. Papers addressing the processes through which bodies become encultured and the effects of particular life experiences on, e.g., cognition, emotions, perception, as well as those offering methodological interventions for studying the body’s role in cultural processes, are especially welcome. 

(Session Organizer) Alessandra Lembo, University of Chicago 

Formal Models of Duality in Culture and Society (Co-sponsored by Section on Sociology of Culture) 

Marking fifty years since its publication, Ron Breiger’s 1974 paper on “The Duality of Persons and Groups” continues to serve as the foundation of a lively research agenda across various fields in sociology. During the last five decades, scholars have exploited and generalized Breiger’s duality idea “beyond persons and groups” to apply to all settings featuring a dual co-constitution of entities across different orders of organization. This session, jointly sponsored by the Mathematical Sociology and Sociology of Culture Sections, seeks papers pushing Breiger’s duality idea forward both in terms of formal methodological innovation and substantive application to core issues in cultural analysis and the measurement of culture broadly conceived. These may include duality in cultural networks, fields of cultural production and consumption, cases and variables, persons and beliefs, and symbols and practices, among others. Papers seeking to move “beyond duality” both methodologically and substantively will also be considered. 

(Session Organizer) Omar A. Lizardo, University of California-Los Angeles 

Section on Sociology of Culture Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtables 

(Session Organizer) Kevin Kiley, North Carolina State University; (Session Organizer) Parker Muzzerall; (Session Organizer) Claire Sieffert