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COLLOQUIUM SEMINAR ON SOCIOLOGICAL ISSUES - FALL 2020

FALL 2020 COLLOQUIA

All Colloquia are held 3:30-5:00 pm. 

Schedule subject to change.
View more info on our Events page.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2020 3:30 PM

Co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology, the Department of Women, Gender & Sexuality, the School of Medicine, and the Field Methods Workshop

Title: Professional Work in a ‘Post-Racial’ Era: Black Health Care Workers in the New Economy
Professor Adia Harvey Wingfield
Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor of Arts & Sciences
Department of Sociology
Washington University

Via Zoom (Email sociology@virginia.edu for the link.)

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2020 3:30 PM

Title: Learning to be Latino: How Colleges Shape Identity Politics
Professor Daisy Verduzco Reyes
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology
University of California Merced

Via Zoom (Email sociology@virginia.edu for the link.)

ABSTRACT OF TALK:

Colleges matter not only because they shape students' job prospects, but also because they influence who, in a broader sense, students may become, shaping their understandings of themselves, their futures, and the world. We know that college campuses have very different organizational cultures, which shape students' experiences in distinct ways. Institutional prestige receives a lot of attention, yet colleges vary along many other dimensions-all of which can affect students. For example, schools have different peer cultures, party scenes, athletic emphases, racial-ethnic climates, and political cultures. Some campuses enclose their students' lives in a bubble for four years, offering an all-encompassing student life experience, while other schools enroll commuters with a very different relationship to the institution. How do these differences in campus climate play out for Latinos? Reyes explores how students learn particular and unique lessons at their college about what it means to be Latino on campus and in America; these lessons about identity are critical, as they inform understandings and strategies of how to best engage in collective action to advocate for change.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2020 3:30 PM

Title: Excavating Historical Layers: From Slave Market to Omni Royal Hotel in New Orleans
Professor Angel Adams Parham
Reverend Joseph H. Fichter, S.J. Distinguished Professor of Social Science and Associate Professor of Sociology
Loyola University - New Orleans

Via Zoom (Email sociology@virginia.edu for the link.)

ABSTRACT OF TALK:

“The old St. Louis is gone, in all its glory, with its busy crowd of merchants and planters.  The great auctions of land and horses and negroes are heard no more, and in its place stands the great Hotel Royal…”. This wistful account of Hotel Royal’s slave-auctioning history was penned in 1898.  Today its most recent incarnation stands on the same ground in the French Quarter at the corner of St. Louis and Royal streets and is a popular tourist destination. For several years now, protestors in the U.S. have been demanding accountability for race-based injustices that continue to be inscribed on today’s landscapes.  Such protests generally coalesce around building names and monuments that are very clearly linked to controversial persons.  But so much of our landscape, and so many of our institutions, are intricately tied to histories of injustice.  How do these histories shape our lives and understandings of ourselves? How do we make sense of and live in the knowledge of these histories?

“Excavating Historical Layers” employs the concept of the lieu de souvenir as a way of making sense of the past and its multi-valent relations to the present.  The lieu de souvenir is a conceptual cousin of Pierre Nora’s lieu de mémoire.  But while Nora’s lieux de mémoire consist of consciously and proudly nurtured place memories, lieux de souvenir consist more often of shadowed memories—either consciously concealed or long-forgotten. When they are excavated, they often invite critical and difficult conversations about unequal geographies and histories and how the larger community should respond in light of this knowledge.  This social excavation of the site at the old St. Louis Hotel forms part of a larger historical ethnography of New Orleans that is being constructed around several key lieux de souvenir across the city. While the focus on New Orleans is local, the study is proposed as a model in service to the larger thesis that a similar lieux de souvenir approach in other communities is vital to our ability to come to terms with our different understandings of the past as a step toward envisioning equitable communities for the future.