Dear Members of the Culture Section,

I hope you had a chance to connect with the people, ideas, and perhaps places that matter most to you during the winter break and were able to replenish your energies for the important work you are doing.

One of the highlights of my fall semester was to email members of the section, usually sociologists whom I don’t know personally, asking for free labor on behalf of the section and getting lots of emails back saying, “yes”, “sure”, “happy do it.” It is a testament to peoples’ individual generosity but also (I think) to the sense of goodwill that the section has created over the years, the sense that being connected to each other across institutions through this section and through sections in general really is meaningful and important.

I thank Laura Adler, Laura Nelson, Lyn Spillman, and Natasha Warikoo for chairing one of our awards committees, and many others for serving on them.

I hope you consider submitting your work.  Upcoming deadlines are for the award for best article (March 1), best student paper (March 1), and for the Stuart Hall Award (“mid-career sociologist whose work holds great promise for advancing the cultural study of racial or ethnic inequality”) (March 1).

Have you noticed the grammar underlying the programme that Chair-Elect Clayton Childress and the programming committee have put together for this year? 

There will be sessions on:

• Culture in Interactions
• Culture in Objects
• Culture in Organizations and Markets
• Culture in People

as well as co-sponsored sessions with Race, Gender, Class (“Culture and Solidarity Across Difference”) and Mathematical Sociology (“Formal Models of Duality in Culture and Society”), Roundtables and a new edition of our popular “Professionalization Panel” put together by Tania Aparicio.

The deadline for you to submit papers and long abstracts is February 26th at 11.59 Eastern. If you are going to ASA and are making travel arrangements early, bear in mind that we have been assigned … hm, well …  Tuesday as our day.

I hope you agree that the programme is making a pitch as good as any for you to make this a year where you use a suite of sessions to think (again) about this, our very own, “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English Language” and how it relates to other dimensions of the social. I hope I’ll have a chance to discuss “findings” from across the sessions with some of you.

I will be in touch with more opportunities for you to connect with others before and during the ASA Meetings in Montreal.  Stay tuned for invitations to attend events that are part of our online series “Culture and Contemporary Life” as well as the call to sign up for our mentorship programme as either a mentee or a mentor.

Our newsletter team, led in this edition by Man Yao, with support from Clara Cirdan, Nick Dempsey, Hannah Wohl, Manning Zhang and Derek Robey has put together news, which you sent, as well as some fantastic editorial contributions.

I hope you enjoy reading it.

My best,

Monika