July, 2008
Conference Report: “Clifford Geertz in the Human Sciences” - Matthew Norton, Yale University
Submitted by cultureadmin on Wed, 07/16/2008 - 00:00“I didn't realize, when I started out, after an isolated childhood, to see what might be going on elsewhere in the world, that there would be a final exam . . .”, Clifford Geertz said in his 1999 Charles Homer Haskins lecture to the American Council of Learned Societies.
An Invitation to Cultural Sociology at Harvard - Mark Pachucki, Christopher A. Bail, Lauren A. Rivera
Submitted by cultureadmin on Wed, 07/16/2008 - 00:00As Harvard prepares to host the second “Culture Day” in celebration of the 20th anniversary of our section, we write to give colleagues an overview of cultural sociology in our department. Sociologists in William James Hall began laying the foundations of our subfield decades before the so-called “cultural turn.” The early contributions of Daniel Bell, Robert Bellah, Seymour Martin Lipset, David Riesman, Harrison White, and Talcott Parsons, for example, attracted uncommon cohorts of undergraduate and graduate students that included Jeffrey Alexander, Ron Breiger, Paul DiMaggio, Gary Alan Fine, Wendy Griswold, George Madsen, Michael Schudson, Margaret Somers, Ann Swidler, and many others. Many of the ideas that germinated in the hallways of William James Hall in previous decades therefore came to have profound influence on the development of contemporary American cultural sociology.
Sociologist Seeks Stories - Elizabeth Long, Rice University
Submitted by cultureadmin on Wed, 07/16/2008 - 00:00At the Culture Mini-Conference at the ASA in New York last summer, I presented a paper on “Stories as Models” in which I argued that the anecdotes and small stories that sociologists use, often to introduce their work or exemplify a point, are actually “carriers of theory” and do important cognitive work to create or revise conceptual categories and innovate theoretical models or frames.
Re-Conceptualizing Media within Cultural Sociology - Stephen Ostertag
Submitted by cultureadmin on Wed, 07/16/2008 - 00:00As a ubiquitous social phenomenon and societal resource the media are intimately involved in making life meaningful and are of utter importance to cultural sociology. Media sociologists now argue that it’s virtually impossible to escape for long, the ever-present “torrent” of media images (Gitlin 2002) that incessantly call for our attention in late-modern societies. Yet sociologists are hard pressed to find media-themed sessions at our annual meetings. At the last two American Sociological Association meetings in New York (2007) and Montreal (2006) media-themed sessions were virtually absent. Nevertheless, such absence does not necessarily speak to a lack of interest. Several people attending the ASA Culture Section’s mini-conference on modeling held at NYU last summer agreed that the current state of media scholarship in cultural sociology (and sociology in general) is lacking and in need of new insights. In this short essay, I hope to re-ignite media scholarship among cultural sociologists by offering a way to re-conceptualize media’s position within cultural sociology. In doing so, I briefly identify the broad, diffuse, and ubiquitous nature of media discourses in late modern societies, and highlight key media-centric questions from which cultural sociologists may ground future scholarship. My hopes are to help us better understand the nuanced roles of the media in the intricate and dynamic processes of making life meaningful.
Message from the Chair: Thick Description in Causal Claims - Lyn Spillman, Notre Dame
Submitted by cultureadmin on Wed, 07/16/2008 - 00:00Our Anniversary Symposium on “Cultural Sociology and its Others” is an opportunity to reflect on how we negotiate the “trading zones” between cultural sociology and other intellectual subcultures, within sociology and beyond. What particular differences in conceptualization, significance, and evidence have we encountered, and what “pidgin languages” help us with local, practical communication (Galison 1997)? In the fall I suggested that our conceptual suspicion of the explanatory power of “interests” is a core and enormously productive feature of cultural sociology which has sometimes blocked communication in trading zones. Here, I want to discuss another high-stakes “trading zone” issue, but this time a matter of research logic rather than conceptualization – the supposed opposition between “thick description” and causal claims, or between the ideographic and nomothetic in sociological inquiry.
GSS Module Feedback
Submitted by cultureadmin on Wed, 07/16/2008 - 00:00The 2006 General Social Survey (GSS) included a science and technology (S&T) module. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Science Resources Statistics (SRS), the module combined questions that have been asked on previous SRS surveys with new questions, many of which probe different aspects of the cultural authority of science.
SRS is in the early stages of planning data collection for the 2010 GSS. As part of this process, we wish to learn more about how the research community used the 2006 module.
