Fall 2017 Colloquia
All Colloquia are held 3:30-5:00 pm with Reception to follow unless otherwise noted*. Locations listed below.
Schedule subject to change.
View more info on our Events page.
September 21, 2017
“Political Transcendences: Imaginaries, Sociologies, Rhetorics”
Andreas Glaeser
Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Chicago
Location: Robertson Hall Room 227, *reception to follow in Randall Hall 212
Andreas Glaeser is a sociologist of culture with a particular interest in the construction of identities and knowledges. His work interlaces substantive interests with efforts to build social theory. In this vein, his first book develops a theory of identity formation processes in the context of an ethnographic study of Germany's post-unification woes. He is currently finishing a book aiming at the development of a political epistemology which asks how people come to understand the world of politics from within their particular biographical trajectories and social milieus. The substantive focus of this book is the late socialist German state's effort to understand its citizens and to control the opposition as well as the opposition members' efforts to form their independent understanding of state socialism. He has begun work on a new project which studies the emergence of dominant understandings about Muslim immigrants in the interaction between contingent historical events, the cycles of electoral politics, everyday experiences and mass-mediated discourses in Germany, France and Britain.
October 12, 2017
"A Critique of Max Weber's Narrative of Disenchantment"
Hans Joas
Visiting Professor of Sociology and Social Thought, University of Chicago
Location: Auditorium of the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia
October 26, 2017
"'A Very Expensive Ordinary Life': Consumption and Moral Legitimacy among New York Elites"
Associate Professor of Scoiology
New School for Social Research
Location: McLeod Hall Room 2005
November 16, 2017
“The Origins of Globalization Revisited: The Case of Clinton’s U-Turn on US-China Trade, 1993-94”
Ho-Fung Hung
Associate Professor of Sociology, Johns Hopkins
Location: Robertson Hall Room 227
In the midst of an economic crisis in 1993, the Chinese government struggled to reorient the economy to export-driven growth, targeting the US market which has been the largest absorber of East Asian manufactures exports since the 1960s. But in 1993, different factions of the US political establishment – organized labor, different business sectors, foreign policy idealists and realists, etc., were divided over the question of free trade with China (and free trade in general). In this new and ongoing research, I combine sources from the US and China to delineate the surgical lobbying efforts that the Chinese government undertook to shape the balance between pro-trade and anti-trade forces within the US political economy. These efforts, combined with the institutional change in the American state, led to Washington’s embrace of free trade with China as epitomized by Clinton’s unconditional renewal of China’s Most Favored Nation status in 1994. This research shows that the historical rise of free trade was not a linear, inevitable process pre-determined by some structural forces of capitalism as many suggest. Instead, it was as much a result of many contingent and eventful political processes cutting across Global North and South.
November 30, 2017
Film and Discussion - 'Sugarcoated Arsenic' (2014)
Claudrena Harold
Professor of History, Univeristy of Virginia
Location: Robertson Hall Room 227
The film features Vivian Gordon – a Black feminist sociologist, activist, and poet – who received her PhD in Sociology from UVA in 1974 and taught in the department until 1980, while also chairing the Black Studies program here at the university. (Murray Milner knew her very well). In exploring the intellectual, social, and political lives of Black students and faculty at UVA in the 1970s the film draws on rare archival material (audio reels, discarded photographs, local newspapers). However it is not strictly speaking a documentary: the film is performed by current UVA students.
The film has been shown at the Oberhausen Short Film festival in Germany and the Rotterdam International Film Festival in the Netherlands. Claudrena co-directed it with an award-winning experimental filmmaker, Kevin Everson (who teaches at the UVA Art Department).