Dear colleagues in the culture section,

The ASA Meetings are fast approaching, so it is time to look ahead to the conference and to look back on the section activities of the past academic year.

Just because I am looking forward to it, I begin with an invitation to the section’s reception at the conference, which will be a joint reception with the Theory Section and the Consumption Section, and will take place on Sunday August 11th, 7-9:30pm at the Humaniti Hotel: 340, de la Gauchetière Ouest Montréal, (Québec) H2Z 0C3.

Many thanks to Alexander Hoppe, who worked on this for our section alongside Daphne Ann Demetry and Carly Knight.

If you are able to join the conference this year, please come along to our business meeting (Tuesday, August 13^th 9-9.30, Palais des Congrès 511B), where we will, among other things, celebrate our award winners.

Please join our paper sessions. I am grateful to Chair-elect Clayton Childress, who organized this together with Fabien Accominotti, Guillermina  Altomonte, Rachel Skaggs on the programming committee and to the session organizers. Our newsletter editors have put together a schedule for you, that you could save or (if you are like me) print.

Among these events, can I especially highlight our annual professionalization panel for early career researchers? 

Tania Aparicio has assembled a great panel on grant writing (Tuesday, August 13^th, 8 – 9 a.m.), featuring a range of perspectives, including grant recipients and members of selection committees.  If you know someone

(and I bet you do), who could benefit from this opportunity to turn what can be a very lonely practice into a conversation, who may be at the conference but may not read this newsletter, please let them know about it!

Election Results

We have had a fantastic slate of candidates for section positions this year and I would like to thank the nominations committee (chaired by Ruth Braunstein, including also Thomas deGloma, Neha Gondal and Christina Simko) and everyone who agreed to stand.

Please welcome our newly elected officers: Hannah Wohl, our incoming Chair-Elect, Shai Dromi, Jyoti Puri and Ana Villareal as council members and Manning Zhang as student representative.

Clayton Childress has been serving as Chair-Elect this year, and will become Chair at the end of the business meeting in August. Ming-Cheng Lo will continue to serve as Chief Operating Officer. I am already very grateful to them both, as well as to our outgoing Council Members, Tania Aparicio, Jean Beaman, Amian Ghaziani, Vanina Leschziner, and Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra.

Award Winners

All through February, March and April our award committees were collecting, reading, conferring, debating, and ranking your submissions. I am grateful to everyone who contributed to this process. Many congratulation to our winners, which you will find listed in the newsletter further below.

I look forward to celebrating the work our colleagues have highlighted at our business meeting. I also look forward to a lecture by Ben Carrington, who will deliver the first lecture by a winner of the Stuart Hall Award in Cultural Sociology, which “recognizes a mid-career sociologist whose work holds great promise for advancing the cultural study of racial or ethnic inequality.” This will be held online in the fall semester as part of our Culture and Contemporary Life Series.

Culture and Contemporary Life

Speaking of Culture and Contemporary Life, I add my thanks to the colleagues who have led the series this year. Adrianna Munson and Michael Johnston chaired the committee, Jessie Finch and Giovanni Zampieri also made important contributions. You can find reports and recordings of our thematic sessions in our last newsletter and on our website.

Giovanni Zampieri organised a session in May with editors of many of the major journals in our field, who very generously gave their time. This was very well-attended event and an engaging and open conversation, which we (intentionally) did not record. If I had to provide a two-word summary in the form of a “top tip” from these editors, it would be “Avoid Jargon” and, to add 23 more words, “this includes important concepts if you do not explain what exactly you mean by them and why they are important for your article”.  

Last but not at all least, many thanks to our communications committee  (Hannah Wohl (Chair), Nick Dempsey), our newsletter editors, Clara Cirdan, Man Yao, Manning Zhang and our webmaster Derek Robey. It has been fantastic working with them all year.

I hope you enjoy this edition.

All best,

Monika