September, 2009

American Sociological Association Culture Section Prize winners, 2009

Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book
Clifford Geertz Prize for Best Article
Suzanne Langer Prize for Best Student Paper

America’s Collective Memory as Seen by Barack Obama - Howard Schuman - University of Michigan

Collective memories of Americans appeared often in Barack Obama’s campaign speeches and continue to be important to the vision he conveys to the country. In his most significant speeches, he likes to refer to the opening words of the Preamble to the Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union....” Especially significant for Obama is the phrase “a more perfect Union”—not to imply perfection but rather a continued effort at perfecting.


Message from the Chair: NATURE, MACHINE, OR INFORMATION SYSTEM? MISSING THE SIGNS OF ECONOMIC COLLAPSE

As early as 2003, the legendary investor Warren Buffett had issued apocalyptic warnings that derivatives were “financial weapons of mass destruction.” In the summer of 2004, former U.S. Fed chairman Paul Volcker claimed that “there’s a 75 percent chance of a financial crisis in the next five years.” In prose drafted in late 2007, when the Dow was at an all-time high, the financier George Soros asserted “we are in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the 1930s” (2008). All these prophecies were widely reported in the press. Although many if not most business reporters on cable television operated as shills for Wall Street, priming the stock market and housing bubbles with their boosterism, the corps of business reporters in The New York Times and other serious newspapers soberly assessed the perilous state of the economy for years before the great crash of 2008.

An Invitation to Culture at Carolina - Andrew Payton and Vanesa Ribas

As part of our ongoing series aimed at spotlighting loci of cultural sociology in departments across the country, we here at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, or "Carolina" as we Tar Heels call it, would like to give our colleagues an overview of cultural sociology in our department.


The Future of Cultural Sociology - Andrew J. Perrin

On the morning of Monday, August 10, a panel of distinguished cultural sociologists gathered to discuss “The Future of Cultural Sociology.” The panel was organized by incoming section Chair Karen Cerulo and she asked me to moderate. The room was overflowing, and we had a spirited discussion featuring Karin Knorr Cetina, Joshua Gamson, Jeffrey K. Olick, Karen Cerulo, Viviana Zelizer and Ann Mische.

The panelists covered questions about what they did and did not expect to be the future of the sub-discipline and its relationship with other disciplines and other parts of sociology. Toward the end, a discussion emerged of just how much of a “big tent” cultural sociology should be vis-a-vis the sociology of culture. Another way of thinking about this dispute is to what extent the varying elements of cultural sociology—or the sociology of culture—mutually inform one another instead of existing in parallel with one another.

Unsurprisingly, we did not have time to finish the discussion in San Francisco, and so we are moving it online to the discussion area of CultureWeb, the section's website. You can join the conversation below: