COLLOQUIUM SEMINAR ON SOCIOLOGICAL ISSUES - FALL 2021

FALL 2021 Colloquia

All Colloquia are held 3:30-5:00 pm. 

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

Thursday, October 14, 2021 3:30 PM

Title: “Talking about It and Being about It: Exploring Individual and Organizational Responses to Summer 2020”
Professor Corey Fields
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Georgetown University

Abstract:
COVID-19 and nationwide protests over racial injustice were the defining stories of Summer 2020. As ubiquitous as both issues were in the US, they did not necessarily generate similar responses. This new project attempts to capture and analyze responses to both issues at the individual and organizational level. The research draws on two separate data sources, interviews with a nationally representative sample of US residents and public statements from Fortune 500 companies. Both data sources suggest that although there was broad awareness and acknowledgement of both COVID-19 and protests over racial injustice, they triggered very different responses. At the individual level, race and ethnicity were important drivers of responses across both issues. In contrast, organizational responded differently depending on the issue, not the characteristics of the organization. Across both levels of response, the summer protests about policing and racial justice mostly triggered calls for talk and conversation among White individuals and all corporations. In contrast, individual and organizational responses to COVID-19 focused on actions that were taken to manage life in the pandemic. The data illustrate parallels between individual and organizational responses that position COVID-19 as an issue that triggered actions, while situating racial justice as an issue that generates conversation.

3:30 pm - 5:00 pm - Rouss Hall 410

Thursday, November 18, 2021 3:30 PM

Title: "Paradoxes of Survivorhood: Becoming Legible after Domestic Violence”
Professor Paige Sweet
Assistant Professor, University of Michigan

Abstract:
For women who have experienced domestic violence, proving that you are a “good victim” is no longer enough. Victims must also show that they are recovering, as if domestic violence were a disease: they must transform from “victims” into “survivors.” Women’s access to life-saving resources may even hinge on “good” performances of survivorhood. In this talk, I focus on how domestic violence victims make themselves legible as “good” survivors in the increasingly medicalized institutions surrounding domestic violence. Victims face pressure to attend therapy – and demonstrate psychological recovery – in order to access state resources like child custody and visas. Second, I highlight the strategies that women develop to become legible as “survivors” in powerful institutions, such as performing survivorhood through “respectable” motherhood and sexuality. More generally, I use an intersectional lens to uncover how “resilience” and “survivorhood” can become coercive and exclusionary forces in women’s lives. As such, this project wrestles with questions about the gendered nature of the welfare state, the unintended consequences of feminist mobilizations for anti-violence programs, and the women who are left behind by the limited forms of citizenship we offer them.

December 9, 2021 3:30 PM

Title: “Shaping Science: Organizations, Decisions, and Culture on NASA’s Teams”
Professor Janet Vertesi
Associate Professor of Sociology, Princeton University
Via Zoom