Spring 2019 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.

Thursday, January 17, 2019 3:30 PM to 5:00 PM
January 17, 2019
Claudio Benzecry
Associate Professor, Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University
Location: Robertson Hall 227, *reception to follow in Randall Hall 212

Claudio Benzecry is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies specializing in the sociology of culture. He is author of The Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of an Obsession (University of Chicago Press, 2011) which earned several American Sociological Association awards and was declared one of ten major books in sociological theory by Contemporary Sociology. Benzecry’s book From Head to Toe: Everyday Globalization in a Creative Industry (University of Chicago Press) is currently under contract.

Title: "The World at her Fit. Scale-making, uniqueness and standardization"

Abstract:

When studying globalization, the theory-method nexus has usually favored macro-level approaches. Even those that focus on the micro have emphasized it as an explanandum of the macro. Some scholars have worked to generate large-scale accounts of commodity production or network formation; others, the ethnographic yet “localized” study of how global forces act in one particular locale. A few recent studies have focused on the “production of” culture, knowledge, and subjects—or their contestation—by looking at the role of state and market actors in changing colonial and post-colonial contexts. Less attention has been given in sociology to “friction” (Tsing 2005), the contingency lurking within every link of the large-scale chains, the fact that each step along a commodity chain is an arena of its own, with actors in micro competing and collaborating in real time. So my question for this lecture is simple: what happens when we look at “the global” as something that needs to be maintained by actors worried in the quotidian about its potential breakdown? 

Thursday, January 31, 2019 3:30 PM to 5:00 PM
January 31, 2019
Stephan Fuchs
Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia
Location: Robertson Hall 227, *reception to follow in Randall Hall 212

Stephan Fuchs received his M.A. in History in 1985 from Bremen University, and then received a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California at Riverside in 1989. From 1989 until 1991, he was Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of New Hampshire, and then moved to the University of Virginia, where he is now Professor of Sociology. His main interests are in social theory, sociology of culture and science, and complex organizations.

Title: "Hegel's Relational Ontology"

Current interest in merging systems and network theories of society stand to benefit from an account of Hegel's relational ontology, which thinks the worlding of the modern world as a relation between Subject and Object (Luhmann: System and Environment). "Hegel"  is the end of the beginning (of Western metaphysics), and the beginning of the end (of modernity). Thinking dialectically means to think the unity of this difference.

March 21, 2019
Kenneth Andrews
Mason Distinguished Professor and Department Chair
Location: Robertson Hall 227, *reception to follow in Randall Hall 212

Kenneth Andrews is a Mason Distinguished Professor and Department Chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  His areas of interest include Social Movement, Political Sociology, Organizations, Race and Ethnicity and Environment.

Title:  "Protest, Organizing, and the 2018 Midterm Elections"

MA/QP COLLOQUIUM

Thursday, March 28, 2019 3:30 PM to 5:00 PM
Robertson Hall 227

Presenters:

Yapeng Wang
Title:  "Positively Maintained Inequality: Do Women from All Family Backgrounds Reach Parity or Surpass Men in College Attendance Over Time in China?"
Advisor:  Josipa Roksa

Elene Kekelia
Title: "Nationalism in exile: The memory of the Georgian émigré community (1921-2018)"
Adviser: Jeffrey K. Olick

Abigail Moore
Title: "Communion and Community: How Liberal Churches Maintain Communal Identity without Exclusionary Boundaries"
Advisor: Isaac Reed

Heidi Nicholls
Title: "The Cultural Politics of Sovereignty: Semiotic currents and the Polynesian Voyaging Society"
Advisor: Isaac Reed

Shayne Zaslow
Title:  "Mainstream Novelty: Examining the shifting visibility of drag performance"
Advisor:  Andrea Press

Alida Goffinski
Title: "Reception Study of Girodet's "Citoyen Belley": Ontological Metalepsis and the Paradox of Blackness, 1798-2016" 
Advisor: Isaac Reed