Message from the Chair: Global Differences in Conceptualizing Culture
Submitted by cultureadmin on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 15:29Why should US sociologists learn to speak or read other languages, when English is the world language? Aren’t the sociologies of non-English language communities transposed seamlessly into English?
Special Announcement from Mark Jacobs
Submitted by cultureadmin on Mon, 10/26/2009 - 14:35In the spirit of the session "Global Differences in Conceptualizing Culture" at ASA 08, the dialogue we began in Boston has grown and spread to Europe. The texts of the four presentations along with my "Message from the Chair" that all appeared *Culture* this spring were republished (along with two other commentaries, by Tia De Nora and Rudi Laermans) in the inaugural issue of the newsletter of the Research Network--Culture of the European Sociological Association. There, the assembled papers comprise over 40 pages of text. You can download the entire issue from the ESA website--
American Sociological Association Culture Section Prize winners, 2009
Submitted by cultureadmin on Wed, 09/23/2009 - 16:51Mary 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
Submitted by cultureadmin on Wed, 09/23/2009 - 16:37Collective 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
Submitted by cultureadmin on Wed, 09/23/2009 - 16:34As 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
Submitted by cultureadmin on Wed, 09/23/2009 - 16:32As 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
Submitted by cultureadmin on Thu, 09/10/2009 - 13:34On 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:
How Culture Changes: Looking Back at The Meanings of May - Paris 1968 - Vera L. Zolberg, New School for Social Research
Submitted by cultureadmin on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 15:53At its best, sociology is an ongoing conversation in which ideas are exchanged among scholars that sometimes lead to unexpected developments in knowledge. This is what occurred to me a year after re-reading a statement by Elizabeth Long on "Stories as Models," in which she proposed ways in which anecdotes and small stories may serve sociologists to introduce their work or exemplify a point.
What We Learn from the Humanities - Jeffrey C. Alexander, Yale University
Submitted by cultureadmin on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 15:52(Conference in honor of Professor Ruth Katz, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, December 2008.)
Creating an Inclusive Venue for Sociological Studies of Language - Celine-Marie Pascale, John Mohr, and Corinne Kirchner
Submitted by cultureadmin on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 15:42Language, broadly construed as systems of representation, is arguably the foundation of shared culture—it is the premier symbolic system. While language is central to social interaction and social structures, it remains at the margins of sociological research and theory. Given the profoundly interpretative nature of language, studies of language often have been regarded as being more humanistic than scientific.
