Hector Perla
Hector Perla
Latin American and Latino Studies, UCSC
Salvadoran Transnationalism: Diasporic Mobilization & State Engagement
May 20 – 12:30-2pm, College 8 Room 301
This paper traces the history and evolution of Salvadoran Transnationalism. It seeks to lay out a chronological typology of transnational mobilization by the Salvadoran diaspora toward both El Salvador and the United States. At the same time, it documents the evolving relationship of the U.S. and Salvadoran states with the Salvadoran diaspora. The paper thus hopes to understand what aspects of current Salvadoran transnational engagement are traditional and ongoing, which are simply old wine in new bottles, and what if any practices are indeed novel.
Dr. Hector Perla Jr. (Ph.D. UCLA Political Science, 2005) is an Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He earned his BA in International Relations from San Francisco State University and his MA in Latin American Studies from Stanford University. During 2007-2008, Professor Perla was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow affiliated to UC Irvine’s departments of Political Science & Chicano/Latino Studies. He was also a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for Latin American Studies. He is currently finishing his book manuscript, entitled Revolutionary Deterrence: U.S. Coercion & Transnational Resistance by Sandinista Nicaragua. Dr. Perla’s areas of specialization are International Relations (IR) and Latin American Studies. His research and teaching interests range from IR Theory, US-Latin American Relations, Latin American Politics, Asymmetric Conflicts, Transnational Social Movements, to Public Diplomacy, Media & Public Opinion, US Foreign Policy Formation, Latino Politics, and Political Psychology. Professor Perla has published or forthcoming work in: The San Francisco Chronicle, NACLA, Latin American Research Review, Latin American Perspectives, Socialism & Democracy, International Organization, Latino Studies, The Americas, Political Science Quarterly, Journal of Third World Studies, and Latin American Politics & Society.
Imani Perry
Imani Perry
African-American Studies, Princeton University
Racial Inequality as Culture
May 6 – 12:30-2pm, ***College 8 Red Room*** (please note change from usual location)
In a talk based upon her book, More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States, Perry will present a lecture on her argument that it is most effective to understand racial inequality as a cultural practice, reproduced by collective action, as opposed to as a simple institutional or individual injury.
Imani Perry is a Professor in the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University, and a faculty associate in the Program in Law and Public Affairs and Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is the author of two books: Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Duke University Press, 2004) and More Beautiful and more Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Ineuality in the U.S. (NYU Press, 2011) and numerous articles in the fields of law and cultural studies. Perry holds a Ph.D. and a J.D. from Harvard University, a L.LM. from Georgetown University Law Center and a B.A. from Yale College.
Event co-sponsors: the Program in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and the departments of Latina American and Latino Studies, Politics, and Literature
GIovanna di Chiro
Jessica Roy Memorial Lecture
“Embodied Ecologies: Connecting Sustainability and Environmental Justice”
April 26 – 4pm-6pm, College Nine, Namaste Lounge ***Please note alternate time/location***
Giovanna di Chiro is Director of Environmental Programs at Nuestras Raíces, Inc. in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and Research Associate at the Five Colleges Research Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. She has published widely on the intersections of environmental science and policy, with a focus on social and economic disparities and human rights. She is co-editor of the volume Appropriating Technology: Vernacular Science and Social Power and is completing a book titled Embodied Ecologies: Science, Politics, and Environmental Justice. Her current work examines environmental justice activists’ reframing of the climate change debate to focus on the local, bodily impacts of wide-scale environmental problems like global warming. She is widely known for her research and practice focusing on community-based approaches to sustainability and the intersections of social justice and sustainability. Di Chiro teaches environmental studies and collaborates with environmental justice organizations to conduct community-based research on environmental health concerns and on developing culturally relevant sustainability initiatives in poor and low-income communities. She has received numerous research fellowships and grants, including from the Rockefeller Foundation, the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the American Association of University Women, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, and the US Environmental Protection Agency. She serves on the international editorial board of Zed Books’ series on gender and environment.
Co-hosted by the Critical Sustainabilities Working Group of the Urban Studies Research Cluster, Institute for Humanities Research, and College 9.
Graduate Workshop: Pedagogies and Practices: Teaching Sociology at UCSC
April 22 – 12:30-2pm, College 8 Room 301
How do we practice sociology as pedagogy? What makes for fruitful learning experiences, successful classes? What difficulties do we encounter? How has our student body changed and in what ways are we responding to those changes?
Join Sociology faculty, lecturers and graduate students for the first of a series of roundtable discussions about teaching sociology here at UCSC. Each discussant will explore their own pedagogies and practices with attention to format (big lecture vs. discussion sections), evaluation (assignment construction, grading), teaching unruly sociological topics (race/class/gender/sexuality in the classroom), and finding the balance between exciting and overwhelming our students (and ourselves).
Organized by Ariana Kalinic
Facilitated by Jimiliz Valiente Neighbors
Discussants:
Prof. Craig Reinarman
Assoc. Prof. Debbie Gould
Ariana Kalinic, graduate student
Yvonne Kwan, graduate student
Wendy Martyna, Lecturer, Sociology.
Claire Colomb
Claire Colomb
Geography, University College London
Pushing the Urban Frontier: Place Marketing, ‘Creative City’ Agendas and Urban Conflicts in Berlin and Hamburg. Fighting for the Right to the (Creative) City? Monday, April 15, 12:30-3, College 8 Room 301
This presentation will focus on the urban conflicts and social movements which have arisen recently in the context of, and partly as a response to, ‘creative city policies’ in Berlin and Hamburg (Germany). In several German cities there is mounting evidence of a growing mobilization by cultural producers and so-called ‘creatives’ in protest movements and coalitions formed to oppose the growth-oriented, entrepreneurial policy agendas pursued by local leaders and the appropriation or outright destruction of culture and creativity which such agendas entail. In Berlin, since 2008 a protest movement has been opposing the planned redevelopment of the MediaSpree waterfront area into a media district. In Hamburg, following the occupation of a small site threatened by corporate redevelopment in 2009, a collective of artists, musicians and social activists published a manifesto entitled ‘Not in Our Name’ denouncing the use and instrumentalization of arts, culture and creativity in municipal economic development and city marketing policies. In both cases, cultural producers or so-called ‘creatives’ played a leading role in the movements and explicitly articulated a critique of the ‘creative city’ agenda and of its consequences and impacts on urban spaces. Additionally, in both cases the protest movements widened their initial claim by embracing the ‘Right to the City’ concept. In the presentation I analyze the composition, agenda, achievements and contradictions of these social mobilizations, with reference to the hypothesis made in 2001 by David Harvey in a chapter of Spaces of Capital (‘The Art of Rent: Globalization and the Commodification of Culture’), i.e. that of the increasing mobilization of cultural producers in oppositional movements in an era of wholesale instrumentalization of culture and creativity in contemporary processes of capitalist urbanization. The presentation will conclude by discussing whether similar trends are witnessed in other countries and cities, and propose a future research agenda on the role of artists, cultural producers and ‘creatives’ in urban social movements across the globe.
Claire Colomb is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Urban Sociology and European Spatial Planning at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London (UCL), UK. She holds a first degree in Politics and Sociology from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences-Po) and a PhD in Town Planning from UCL. Her research interests include urban governance, planning and urban policies in European cities (with a particular focus on the UK, France, Germany and Spain); place marketing, culture and urban regeneration; European spatial planning; trans-boundary cooperation between cities and regions in Europe and the Mediterranean. Over the past 15 years she has studied, lived, taught and researched in France, the UK, Germany and Spain. Her book Staging the New Berlin: Place Marketing and the Politics of Urban Reinvention was published in 2011 by Routledge. She is also co-author of European Spatial Planning and Territorial Cooperation (Routledge, 2010).
Leslie Salzinger
Leslie Salzinger
Accounting for the Unaccountable: Blaming Testosterone for Markets gone Wild
In 2008, the much-touted capacity of the “invisible hand” to spin self-interest into gold was looking increasingly unreliable. Under Congressional interrogation, a sober Greenspan admitted, “I’d found a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works.” That same year, scientists at the University of Cambridge published the first of several studies purportedly correlating testosterone and cortisol levels with risk-taking and profit levels among individual traders. The studies were trumpeted in headlines in the business press, where the lead author was quoted as saying “Testosterone is the hormone of irrational exuberance.” A few months later in the NY Times, Nicholas Kristof wrote, “[C]ould it be that the problem on Wall Street wasn’t subprime mortgages, but elevated testosterone?” I argue that these developments are linked. As the market machine proved less and less dependable, biology emerged as an intelligible culprit for market failures, filling the vacuum created by a neoliberal discourse that, after displacing a more social and concrete economic vocabulary, has been unable to account for its own consequences. A sociological understanding of masculinity as a category that addresses and constitutes market subjects can be used as a wedge to challenge the asocial view of “the market” and bring our attention back to the social and political strategies behind the ongoing crisis.
LESLIE SALZINGER is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. She got her PhD in Sociology at UC Berkeley and previously taught in the Sociology departments at the University of Chicago and Boston College. She is an ethnographer focused on gender, economic sociology, globalization, and feminist theory. Much of her research is in Latin America. Her primary research interests lie in the cultural constitution of economic processes, and in the creation of subjectivities within political economies. Her award-winning first book, Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico’s Global Factories (http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9001.html), analyzed the gendered dimensions of transnational production. Her current work-in-progress, Model Markets: Peso/Dollar Exchange as a Site of Neoliberal Incorporation, analyzes peso/dollar exchange markets as crucial gendered and raced sites for Mexico’s shift from “developing nation” to “emerging market.”
Tanya Golash-Boza
Tanya Golash-Boza
Mass Deportation and the Neoliberal Cycle
The United States is deporting more people than ever before – nearly 400,000 each year since 2006. Many deportees have close ties to the United States: in 2011, 100,000 deportees had U.S. citizen children. The vast majority of deportees are men of color. How do we explain this devastating policy shift? I argue that neoliberalism and, by extension, global capitalism, make the mass deportation of men of color possible in the current context. Mass deportation is a U.S. policy response designed to relocate surplus labor to the periphery and to keep labor in the United States compliant. The U.S. public accepts this policy response because it targets men of color – people perceived to be expendable in the current economy.
TANYA GOLASH-BOZA is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Merced. She is the author of three books: 1) Due Process Denied (2012), which describes how and why non-citizens in the United States have been detained and deported for minor crimes, without regard for constitutional limits on disproportionate punishment; 2) Immigration Nation (2012), which provides a critical analysis of the impact that U.S. immigration policy has on human rights; and 3) Yo Soy Negro: Blackness in Peru (2011), the first book in English to address what it means to be black in Peru. She has also published many articles in peer-reviewed journals on deportations, racial identity, human rights, U.S. Latinos/as and Latin America, in addition to essays and chapters in edited volumes and online venues. Her innovative scholarship was awarded the Distinguished Early Career Award from the Racial and Ethnic Minorities Studies Section of the American Sociological Association in 2010. You can follow her on twitter at @tanyagolashboza and subscribe to her blogs: http://getalifephd.blogspot.com/ and http://www.stopdeportationsnow.blogspot.com/
Shannon Gleeson
Shannon Gleeson
“Rights in Theory, Rights in Practice: Unpacking the Individual and Institutional Elements of Enforcing Worker Rights”
This paper examines the process of “making rights real” for low-wage workers. An extensive body of research has examined the challenges of labor standards enforcement, yet we also know that many workers do come forward to make claims on their rights, often with the help of a community advocate. Drawing on a survey of 472 low-wage workers who have received assistance from one of four San Francisco Bay Area legal aid clinics, I examine how workers gain and deploy knowledge about their rights, what challenges they face in doing so, and what role immigration status plays in this process. Based on 50 in-depth interviews with workers 12-18 months into their claim, my findings also highlight the important but limited role of the labor standards enforcement bureaucracy for improving the conditions of low-wage workers. Steep evidentiary standards pose challenges especially for contingent workers, agency-mandated mediation often yields grossly imbalanced settlements, investigations and hearings may take years to complete, and even positive final judgments may never be fully enforced as employers claim bankruptcy and regulators struggle to impose meaningful penalties. Small business employees, workers in the informal economy, seasonal workers, and those workers who are sub-contracted are frequently excluded from legal protections altogether. Ultimately, I argue, lay understandings and expectations for justice diverge sharply from those embedded in legal theory.
SHANNON GLEESON is Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her Ph.D. in 2008 in Sociology and Demography from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the workplace experiences of immigrants, the role of documentation status, and the processes of legal mobilization. She also has conducted research on immigrant civic engagement in Silicon Valley and the bureaucratic processes of labor standards enforcement. Her book, Conflicting Commitments: The Politics of Enforcing Immigrant Worker Rights in San Jose and Houston, was published in 2012 by Cornell University Press.
Anna Tsing
Anna Tsing
Monday, January 14
Slow Disturbance: Living with Contaminated Diversity
Matsutake is a wild mushroom that lives in human-disturbed forests. Like rats, raccoons, and cockroaches, it is willing to put up with some of the environmental messes humans have made. Yet it is not a pest; it is a valuable gourmet treat—at least in Japan, where high prices sometimes make matsutake the most valuable mushroom on earth. Furthermore, through its ability to nurture trees, matsutake helps forests grow in daunting places. To tell the story of matsutake is thus to show the promise of living together in this time of human environmental disturbance.
This talk offers excerpts from my manuscript in progress: Living in ruins: Capitalism, Blasted Landscapes, and the Possibilities of Life on Earth: a Mushroom Story. In the talk, I will introduce two concepts. “Slow disturbance,” like slow foods and slow cities, gestures toward possibility—here the possibility of human-altered landscapes in which species other than human domesticates might also survive. “Contaminated diversity” refers to those forms of cultural and biological diversity that have emerged with the last five hundred years of environmental destruction, extinction, genocide, racism, imperial conquest, profit-mongering, and imperial rule. Using my research on matsutake commerce and ecology, I suggest how contaminated diversity might offer potential collaborators for building slow disturbance worlds.
ANNA TSING is Professor of Anthropology at UCSC. She is the author of In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place and Friction: an Ethnography of Global Connections, both with Princeton University Press. She has co-edited many collections, including, most recently, Words in Motion: Towards a Global Lexicon (with Carol Gluck).
Bill Friedland
Bill Friedland
Monday, January 7
Wine: The Political Economy of an Agricultural Commodity
In California, grapes form three major commodity forms: fresh table, raisins, and wine. Of the three, wine is by far the most significant economically, in employment, and culturally. After a brief introduction on the sociology of agrifood and commodity systems analysis, this session will focus on California wine which, in its modern form began in the 1960s. This presentation draws from the forthcoming Trampling Out Advantage: the Political Economy of California Wine, Table Grapes, and Raisins, currently in preparation.
WILLIAM H. FRIEDLAND is Professor Emeritus and Research Professor of Sociology and Community Studies. He was the founding chair of Community Studies, the first interdisciplinary department at UCSC. Community Studies encouraged undergraduate majors to participate actively with communities and organizations that have historically been ignored by the University of California. Professor Friedland recently organized the Alternative Agrifood Researchers Without Borders to support activist research by graduate students with alternative agrifood movements. He was honored last summer at the Lisbon World Congress of Rural Sociology as the Founder of Agricultural Sociology and by the Rural Sociology Society as a Distinguished Rural Sociologist for his pioneer work in establishing the Sociology of Agriculture and Food. His publications include analyses of processing tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, globalization and agrifood, and the products of the grapevine.
Annette Marines
- Annette Marines
Monday, December 10 – 12:30-2:00 p.m. – College 8 Room 201
This session is designed to help graduate students transition to graduate-level research at UC Santa Cruz. We will explore the new Sociological Abstracts (from Proquest) platform and features. We will discuss advanced strategies for uncovering relevant research in your area. You will learn about citation management software, including Zotero, EndNote, and Mendeley, to determine the best tool for managing your information. This will also provide an opportunity to meet our new sociology librarian, and, in Q&A, to investigate new possibilities for support in terms of collections, acquisitions, and teaching.
Jenny Reardon
- Jenny Reardon
Monday, November 26, 2012
Jenny Reardon is an Associate Professor of Sociology, Faculty Affiliate in the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering, and a primary organizer of the Science and Justice Initiative at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In all her research, Reardon seeks to extend our emerging understanding of how science and the social order are constituted together, and explores how such understandings might help us to more adequately address questions of social justice in a technoscientific age. Her book, Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics, was published with Princeton University Press in 2005. Under a sole-investigator grant from the National Science Foundation, Reardon is currently investigating the paradoxes and dilemmas that confront researchers, policy makers and potential research subjects who seek to address the problems of governance and research design created by the focus on human groups as objects of genomic analysis. She is also engaged in a study of the emergence of genomic medicine. This study seeks to clarify the concepts and practices of health, illness, justice, individual, race, population, and environment that both shape and are formed by efforts to translate genomic information into medical practice.
Melissa Checker
- Melissa Checker
Monday, November 19, 2012
As cities around the world compete to brand themselves as sustainable, they publicize initiatives to reduce carbon emissions, enhance open space and promote bike lanes, community gardens and farmer’s markets. But, such green priorities gloss over “old school” (or legacy) contaminants like lead, PCBs, arsenic and mercury, which disproportionately plague low income and people of color neighborhoods. This presentation draws on ethnographic research in New York City to examine the disjunctures between city officials’ and grassroots activists’ definitions of environmental, social and economic sustainability. In so doing, Checker shows how grassroots environmental justice activists challenged the fragmentation and incongruities of various sustainability initiatives, which worked to perpetuate a legacy of environmental injustice and to distract public attention away the realities of a toxic urban infrastructure as well as an ever-eroding democratic process.
Melissa Checker is Associate Professor of Urban Studies, and Director of the Environmental Studies Program, at Queens College of the City University of New York. Her research focuses on environmental justice, urban sustainability in the United States, and the social justice implications of the green economy and social movements. Her most recent book, Polluted Promises: Environmental Racism and the Search for Justice in a Southern Town (NYU Press, 2005) won the 2007 Association for Humanistic Sociology Book Award and was a finalist for the Julian Steward Award and the Delmos Jones and Jagna Sharff Memorial Book Prize.She also co-edited (with Maggie Fishman) Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power, and Public Life (Columbia U Press, 2004), and has authored a number of academic articles and book chapters as well as articles for popular magazines and newspapers. Her current focus is on environmental justice activism in an era of dual ecological and economic crisis. She is conducting ethnographic research on extended struggles and strategies for environmental justice in the U.S. South, and on the relationship between environmental justice activism and sustainable policies and practices in New York City. She is also co-editor (along with Alaka Wali and David Vine) of the “Public Anthropology Reviews” section of American Anthropologist.
Louise Mozingo
- Professor Louise Mozingo
At first glance, the shimmering, suburban rim of the American metropolis might seem haphazard compared to the tightly organized urbanism of the center city. Among those seemingly baffling, yet actually decipherable suburban scenes, are the offices of corporate management. Constructed by the most powerful global entities, large-scale, corporate offices were the last of the center city land uses to emerge in the suburbs, in the 1940s, after housing, manufacturing, and retail commerce. These spaces shaped urban regions nationwide, and had a powerful effect on our own region through the development of “Silicon Valley.” Louise Mozingo author of Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes examines the evolution, consequences, and possible future of this form of postwar American urbanism in social and environmental terms.
Louise Mozingo is Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, a member of the Graduate Group in Urban Design of the College of Environmental Design, and Director of the American Studies program of the College of Letters and Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. A former Associate and senior landscape architect for Sasaki Associates, Prof. Mozingo joined department after a decade of professional practice. In 2009 she became the founding director of a research interdisciplinary team at the College of Environmental Design, the Center for Resource Efficient Communities (CREC) dedicated to supporting resource efficiency goals through environmental planning and urban design. www.crec.berkeley.edu Prof. Mozingo’s research and creative work focuses on ecological design, landscape history, and social processes in public landscapes. This research has taken a variety of forms including historical research, criticism, research reports, design plans, and museum exhibitions. Her new book is Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes (2011) from MIT Press, recently won the 2011 American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Award) in the Architecture and Urban Planning category.
Workshop: Getting Your Application Noticed
“Getting Your Application Noticed”
Monday, May 21, 2012
In a highly competitive academic job market, whether you’re ABD or a first-year graduate student, it’s not too soon to start thinking about how you can make your application stand out.
This presentation will focus on experiences from faculty who have read applications for job hires, as well as faculty who have recent experience with finding work.
Panelists: Candace West (Professor of Sociology), Steve McKay (Associate Professor of Sociology), Rachel Bryant Anderson (Ph.D. Alumna, UCSC), and Adrian Felix (Post-Doc, Latin American Area Studies, UCSC)
Elsa Davidson
Elsa Davidson
“The Burdens of Aspiration: Schools, Youth, and the Divided Social Worlds of Silicon Valley”
Monday, May 14, 2012
Drawing on ethnographic research conducted for her book, The Burdens of Aspiration: Youth, Schools, and Success in the Divided Social Worlds of Silicon Valley (NYU, 2011), Professor Davidson’s presentation relates dynamics of aspiration formation among local working and middle class youth to both everyday “lived” spaces of school and neighborhood in the region and young people’s negotiation of the “conceived space” (LeFebvre, 1991) of Silicon Valley, an idealized realm defined by hyper-competitive entrepreneurship, innovation, and, globalization. For middle class white and Asian youth attending a highly ranked public high school in an affluent local community, youth negotiated both definitions of success shaped by a techno-entrepreneurial public culture and conditions of mounting social and economic insecurity for middle class families. For working class Latino/a youth whose families subsist on the margins of the information economy–where youth are often viewed as risks to security and subject to urban surveillance and neoliberal school reforms–there was a “disconnect” between their formal, school-based exposure to Silicon Valley industry and its entrepreneurial public culture, and daily forms of discipline and priorities emphasized in school. In comparing these contrasting cases, Davidson focuses on the ways in which local school and community environments encouraged the “responsibilization” of youth for social and economic conditions across lines of race and class even as they differentiated youth along lines of race and class–a dynamic she suggests is revealed through young people’s expressions of aspiration and practices of self-cultivation.
Elsa Davidson is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Her research focuses on processes of aspiration formation and social reproduction among youth from diverse class, racial, and ethnic backgrounds. In particular, Dr. Davidson is interested in how young people forge aspirations in relation to experiences of schooling, rapid social and economic transformation, and their exposure to emergent ideals of citizenship in the contemporary United States. Her teaching interests include the anthropology of multicultural America, the anthropology of globalization, the anthropology of children/youth, the anthropology of education, and urban anthropology.
Laura Grindstaff
“From Jerry Springer to Jersey Shore: the Cultural Politics of Class in/on US Reality Programming”
Monday, April 30, 12:30p-2:00
Room 301, College 8
Grindstaff’s talk explores what might be considered the ‘performance logic’ of reality programming as it relates to the cultural politics of class. Having conducted ethnographic research on two different genres of reality television in the US, Grindstaff is interested in the tensions between class as an embodied phenomenon and as a discursive phenomenon as parlayed by social institutions such as the media.
Laura Grindstaff is an Associate Professor at UC Davis who teaches in the areas of popular culture, cultural sociology, gender and society, and field methods. Her research focuses broadly on American popular culture and its role in constructing gender, race, and class relations. Her first book, The Money Shot, is an ethnographic account of daytime television talkshows. Based on interviews and participant observation behind-the-scenes, it explores how the production process works to transform the private experiences of “ordinary”people into extraordinary public performances, and what these performances tell us about class inequality in the US.
Claudio Benzecry
“From Taste to Passion. Sociology and Individuation”
Monday, April 16, 12:30p-2:00
Room 301, College 8
The sociology of taste, with its focus on how class, race or status predicts taste, is too weak to explain the moments in which cultural objects orient life and give meaning. Sociology has a difficult time making sense of seemingly irrational or overly-emotional actions. Understanding love for opera allows us to understand a sensual and meaningful aspect of how thanks to our attachment to a cultural product we define who we are, how we present ourselves to others and how we imagine the kind of person we aim to be. Based on an 18 month ethnography, 44 in depth interviews and archival research of opera practices in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this research aims to explain the channels, mechanisms and affiliations through which taste is assembled, and how -thanks to the long term attachment to a cultural object- opera enthusiasts learn paradoxically to be “unique” individuals.
Claudio E. Benzecry is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of The Opera Fanatic. Ethnography of an Obsession (University of Chicago Press 2011), as well as the guest editor of a special issue on “Knowledge in Practice” for Qualitative Sociology. He is a qualitative sociologist, primarily working in the areas of culture, the arts, Latin America and methods. Publications include articles in Theory and Society, Ethnography, the Annals of the American Academy of Social and Political Sciences, and Theory, Culture and Society.
Who Is Going to Pay for My Research?
“Writing a Successful Grant Proposal”
Monday, April 9, 12:30p-2:00
Room 301, College 8
This presentation will outline the nuts and bolts of finding grant sources and creating a competitive and successful application for research funding.
Panelists:
Ashley Tews (UCSC Government Grants Coordinator)
Craig Reinarman (professor of Sociology, UCSC)
Crissy Hatcher (Sociology graduate student)
Claudia Lopez (Sociology graduate student, moderator)
Alondra Nelson
Alondra Nelson
“Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination”
Monday, March 12, 12:30p-2:00
Rm. 599, Engineering 2
Between its founding in 1966 and its formal end in 1980, the Black Panther Party blazed a distinctive trail in American political culture. The Black Panthers are most often remembered for their revolutionary rhetoric and militant action. In this talk, Nelson will discuss a lesser-known aspect of the organization’s broader struggle for social justice: health care. The Black Panther Party’s health activism– its network of free health clinics, its campaign to raise awareness about genetic disease, and its challenges to medical discrimination–was an expression of its founding political philosophy and also a recognition that poor blacks were both underserved by mainstream medicine and overexposed to its harms. Considering the Party as a health social movement, she argues, offers a window on the politics of race and medicine in the 1970s and has implications for how we think about health inequality today. The Black Panther Party’s understanding of health as a basic human right and its engagement with the social implications of genetics anticipated current debates about the politics of health and race. That legacy— and that struggle—continues today in the commitment of health activists and the fight for universal health care.
Please also join the Science & Justice Working Group for:
“Can Science Have Progressive Goals? –
A Discussion with Alondra Nelson”
Tuesday, March 13, 2012, 4:00p-6:00
Engineering 2, 599
Narratives of scientific progress are often paired with narratives about political progress, suggesting that the expansion of scientific knowledge always—or at least generally—leads to the betterment of humankind as a whole. But many socially disadvantaged and oppressed peoples contend that such “progress” is distributed unevenly and often comes at some cost to them. Alondra Nelson will share some of her research on Black politics and genetic genealogy to open a discussion on whether science can have progressive ends, if there can truly be a “science for the people,” and how science and justice can have paired or oppositional goals.
Herman Gray (Sociology) will be a respondent.
Alondra Nelson is associate professor of sociology at Columbia University, where she also holds an appointment in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. An interdisciplinary social scientist, she writes about the intersections of science, technology, medicine and inequality. These themes are taken up in her most recent book, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination, published in 2011. She is also an editor of Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History (2012), Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life (2001), and “Afrofuturism,” (2002) a special issue of the journal Social Text.
An internationally recognized scholar, Nelson has been a visiting fellow at BIOS: Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society at the London School of Economics and at the Baravrian-American Academy in Munich. In 2011, she was a senior fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Nelson received her B.A., magna cum laude, from the University of California at San Diego, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She earned her Ph.D. in from New York University in 2003.
Occupy Wall Street: Historical and Global Contexts
Barbara Epstein and Steve McKay
“Occupy Wall Street: Historical and Global Contexts“
Monday, March 5, 12:30p-2:00
Rm. 301, College 8
This event considers the following questions: What are the relevant global and historical contexts for the Occupy movement in the U.S.? How important is Occupy in the grander scheme of social movements? What conditions have converged to make current widespread forms of uprising possible, in the U.S. and internationally?
Professor Barbara Epstein, Professor of History of Consciousness, will draw on a wealth of experience studying social movements in offering thoughts on the dynamics, processes, issues, and questions important to consider in relation to Occupy.
Barbara Epstein received her doctorate in U.S. History in 1973. As a student in the 1960s and early 1970s at left-leaning schools in New York City, as an undergraduate, and as a graduate student her education took place not only within the classroom but outside it, as a participant in the movements of the time and, in graduate school and beyond, as a member of the editorial collective of the journal then called Socialist Revolution (later, Socialist Review). Her scholarship has consistently been about social movements and the problems that they face, including examination of issues such as gender, religion, non-violence, and cultural radicalism in a wide range of social movements. Epstein teaches courses on theories of social movements, the current transformation of political economy and culture and the range of theories that try to explain it, twentieth-century developments in Marxism, the history of social movements in the U.S., and Jewish social movements in the U.S. and in Eastern Europe. She is Professor and Chair of the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz.
Steve McKay is Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. He received his PhD in Sociology and an MA in Southeast Asian Studies from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and his BA from UC Berkeley. His research and teaching interests include Filipino labor and diaspora, work and labor markets, globalization, racial formation, and masculinity. He is the author of the book, Satanic Mills or Silicon Islands? The Politics of High-Tech Production in the Philippines, ILR/Cornell University Press (2006) and numerous journal articles including, “Filipino Sea Men: Constructing Masculinities in an Ethnic Labor Niche,” in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (May 2007), and “The Squeaky Wheel’s Dilemma: New Forms of Labor Organizing in the Philippines,” in the Labor Studies Journal (2005).
Approaches to Field Statements
Graduate Student Seminar
“Approaches to the Field Statement”
Monday, February 27, 12:30p-2:00
Room 301, College 8
Field statements mark a key development in the academic life of graduate students. Though the prospects of writing field statements may be daunting, this panel is designed to assuage your fears and provide you with strategies and tips for optimizing your work.
Panelists will include Professor Dana Takagi, graduate student Shannon Williams and others. Megan Abed McNamara will moderate.
Jon Robinson
The Sociology Department invites faculty and graduate students from all disciplines to attend:
Jon Robinson
“Understanding economic decision-making and poverty through randomized control trials“
Thursday, February 9, 12:30p-1:45
Rm. 201, College 8
Robinson’s presentation will focus on the latest wave of poverty research, using randomized control trials (RCT) to test the value of various life interventions. Robinson’s research explores the decisional dilemmas that rural poor confront in every day life and how RCT may be used to better address those challenges.
Robinson is an Assistant Professor of Economics at UCSC. His research is focused primarily in sub-Saharan Africa, and includes studies of how individuals cope with risk, a project to understand why farmers do not adopt potentially profitable agricultural technologies, and several small studies of businesses in Kenya. His current work includes evaluations of various strategies to improve health outcomes in poor countries.
In addition to his duties at UCSC, Robinson collaborates with scholars at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at M.I.T., and the Center of Evaluation and Global Action at UC-Berkeley.
Julie Sze
The Sociology Department invites faculty and graduate students from all disciplines to attend:
Julie Sze
“Situating Sustainability Discourse in Shanghai: Global Flows and Urban Transformations in a Warming World“
Monday, February 6, 12:30p-2:00
Rm. 301, College 8
Drawing from her current book project, Sze will discuss flows, fears and fantasies in the contemporary urban and global environmental culture, with a sustained look at Shanghai in China. In particular, Sze will analyze Dongtan, a failed eco-city proposal, within multiple ideological and spatial contexts.
Sze is an Associate Professor of American Studies at UC Davis. She is also the founding director of the Environmental Justice Project for UC Davis’ John Muir Institute for the Environment. and in that capacity is the Faculty Advisor for 25 Stories from the Central Valley.
Sze’s book, Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice, won the 2008 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize, awarded annually to the best published book in American Studies.
Sze’s research investigates environmental justice and environmental inequality; culture and environment; race, gender and power; and community health and activism. She has published on a wide range of topics such as energy and air pollution activism; toxicity; the cultural politics of the Hummer, and on environmental justice novels and cultural production.
Mohammed Bamyeh
The Sociology Department invites faculty and graduate students from all disciplines to attend:
Mohammed Bamyeh
“Revolutionary Ethics and the Making of the Arab Spring”
Monday, January 23, 12:30p-2:00
Room 301, College 8
Dr. Bamyeh’s talk (scheduled close to the one year anniversary of the start of the Arab Spring in Tunisia) will describe how revolutionary processes involve ethical development and the emergence of new forms of subjectivity. His work highlights five areas of ethical transformation in social movements: 1) how revolutionary ethics emerge out of ordinary civic ethics; 2) how this process facilitates agreement without leadership; 3) the combination of confidence and modesty in the revolutionary environment; 4) tolerance of multiple loyalties; and 5) how new ethics become the basis for rejecting Realpolitik.
Bamyeh is currently a professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh and the incoming editor of the International Sociology Review of Books (ISRB). He has held the Hubert H. Humphrey chair in International Studies at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and the SSRC-MacArthur Fellowship in International Peace and Security. He has previously taught at Georgetown University, New York University, SUNY-Buffalo, and the University of Massachusetts.
Occupy Wall Street — Perspectives from Social Science
The Sociology Department invites faculty and graduate students from all disciplines to attend:
Occupy Wall Street: Perspectives from the Social Sciences
Thursday, January 12, 2:00p-4:00
Room 301, College 8
Presenter: Mike King
Facilitators: Miriam Greenberg and Alexis Kargl
Scott Saul
The Sociology Department invites faculty and graduate students from all disciplines to attend:
Scott Saul
“‘What You See Is What You Get’?: Wattstax, Richard Pryor, and the Secret History of the Black Aesthetic in 1970s LA”
Monday, November 14, 12:30p-2:00
Room 301, College 8
Wattstax (1973, dir. Mel Stuart) was an unparalleled cinematic event – a Hollywood-funded “festival film” in the cinema verité tradition of Gimme Shelter and Woodstock, but focused on the black rather than the white counterculture. It captured a perilous moment of black unity in South Los Angeles. It was also, not incidentally, a landmark film in the history of Hollywood’s racial desegregation.
This talk explores the breakthrough that was Wattstax, and recovers some of the peculiarity of Wattstax and its historical moment. It suggests that, in its mix of verité and cartoonish excess – a mix found especially in comedian Richard Pryor’s narration of the film – the film speaks to the productive tensions within the “black aesthetic” as it made contact with “blaxploitation”.
Laura Enríquez
Laura Enríquez
“The Paradoxes of Latin America’s “Pink Tide”: Venezuela and the Project of Agrarian Reform”
Monday, October 31, 12:30p-2:00
Room 301, College 8
A “pink tide” swept over Latin America following Hugo Chávez’ election to the presidency in Venezuela, bringing to power multiple left or center-left governments. What possibilities for and obstacles to social change were presented by their having attained power through the ballot box? This question is explored through an examination of Venezuela’s agrarian reform and the promotion of agroecology within it.
Laura Enríquez is a Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. She has written extensively on social change in Latin America, focusing especially on agrarian issues in socialist and post-socialist states. She has conducted research in Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela. Her most recent book is Reactions to the Market: Small Farmers in the Economic Reshaping of Nicaragua, Cuba, Russia, and China. Dr. Enriquez earned her Ph.D. in sociology from UC-Santa Cruz in 1985.
Paul Johnston — Occupy 101
Paul Johnston
“Occupy 101: Theory and Practice of Occupations from Wall St to Oaxaca to Occupy Santa Cruz”
Wednesday, October 26, 4:oop-5:30
Red Room, College 8
This gathering offers a place to discuss the Occupy Wall Street movement that has recently erupted in the US. After characterizing the movement, Johnston will examine the ensemble of utopian public institutions that emerge in an occupation. Variations on these arrangements are observed in revolutionary communes (Paris 1848, Oaxaca 2006), self-governed strikes, student occupations, and today’s Occupy movement. Ample time will be reserved for participants to discuss these concepts or share other observations on the Occupy movement. Johnston’s talk is grounded in participant observation at Occupy Wall Street, Occupy DC and Occupy Santa Cruz and in previous participant observation in strikes.
Paul Johnston: is a union and community organizer, variously labeled a liberation sociologist and a public sociologist. He is a post-academic sociologist whose research centers on public life, including public organizations, labor and other social movements and citizenship studies. SInce he left his position as an associate professor of sociology at Yale University he has worked in the immigrant and other communities, unions and social movements of the CA central coast while affiliated as a research sociologist with Community Studies, Latin American and Latino Studies and Sociology at UCSC.
Affect Across the Disciplines
The Sociology Department, Affect Working Group, and Center for Cultural Studies invites faculty and graduate students from all disciplines to attend:
“Affect Across the Disciplines” — Panel Discussion
Monday, October 24, 3:30p-5:00
Red Room, College 8
Vilashini Cooppan (Literature)
Sharon Daniel (Film & Digital Media)
Deborah Gould (Sociology)
Kimberly Lau (American Studies)
Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Engineering)
K.J. Joy
The Sociology Department invites faculty and graduate students from all disciplines to attend:
K.J. Joy
“Water Conflicts in India: A Million Revolts in the Making.”
Monday, October 17, 12:30p-2:00
Room 301, College 8
Though there is a lot of talk about water conflicts, including the oft quoted remark that the Third World War would be fought over water, there is very little systematic work on documenting water conflicts. Joy’s research looks in this direction, having recorded and analyzed water conflicts on the Indian penninsula. His talk will focus on what the conflicts tell us about the future of water as well as explore the work being done to resolve these conflicts before they arise.
K. J. Joy has been an activist-researcher in India for more than 20 years with special interest in people’s institutions for natural resource management both at the grassroots and policy levels. His other areas of interests include drought and drought proofing, participatory irrigation management, river basin management, water conflicts and people’s movements. He earned a Master’s degree in Social Work from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and was a Fulbright Fellow with University of California at Berkeley.
Joy has co-authored several books, including Watershed Based Development: A Source Book; Sustainable Prosperity: Sustaining and Enabling Natures Productive Powers; and Water Conflicts in India: A Million Revolts in the Making, the book on which his Santa Cruz talk will be based.
Development Cluster
The Development Cluster will meet on Thursday, May 26th (Noon -2pm) in College Eight, Room 207.
“Using GPS to follow everyday tasks: women’s water collection and changing institutions in Kenya’s slums.”
Featuring: Ben Crow (Sociology) and James Davis (Computer Engineering)
Science & Justice Working Group
Visit the Science and Justice Working Group website to learn more about upcoming events: http://scijust.ucsc.edu/
Damon Brown
The Center for Games & Playable Media and
the Feminism & Pornography Research Cluster present
Damon Brown
Author of Porn & Pong
“Human Sexuality & Video Games”
11 a.m. Friday, May 20, 2011 in Engineering 2, Room 180
From damonbrown.net:
Damon Brown writes about sex, technology, music and video games for Playboy, New York Post and Family Circle, and is the tech columnist for AARP Online and PlanetOut. He is the author of several books, most recently Porn & Pong: How Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider and Other Sexy Games Changed Our Culture.
Damon has a Masters in Magazine Publishing from Chicago’s Northwestern University and a degree in Journalism and Computing from Detroit’s Oakland University. The Jersey native considers New Orleans, Chicago and Lansing (Michigan) his hometowns, but recently established his secret headquarters in Southern Northern California. Reach him at damon at damonbrown dot net.
Professional Development
The UCSC Sociology Department invites you to a Brown Bag Professional Development Workshop:
Finding Your Way in a Changing Profession
Featuring: Craig Reinarman(Professor, Sociology), Shannon Williams (Ph.D. Candidate, Sociology), Nichole Zlatunich (Graduate Student, Sociology)
Monday, May 9, 2011 // 12:30 – 1:45 pm // College Eight, Room 301
Please join us for the “Finding Your Way in a Changing Profession” brown-bag workshop–one of several events hosted by the Sociology Department to build intellectual engagement and community for faculty and graduate students.
As standard, tenure-track academic positions become scarce, it becomes important to consider alternative career possibilities that utilize the special skills and training of those with a sociology Ph.D. Such career tracks include professional research and consulting, public service, nonprofit or NGO work, and a range of other options. In this workshop, Craig, Shannon, and Nichole describe their work and highlight alternative career options for graduate students. Following the panel discussion, we invite questions and comments from the audience.
Development Cluster
The Development Cluster provides a bi-weekly forum open to all departments for discussion of issues in development theories and practices, based on members’ research and presentations of invited guests.
We meet Noon to 1:45 in College 8, Room 207, on the following days:
- Thursday, April 21: Commons & Development (led by Costanza, environmental studies, and Chris, sociology)
- Tuesday, May 3: International fieldwork and methods (led by Ariana and Kevin, sociology)
- Thursday, May 12: TBA
- Thursday, May 26: TBA
Jon Fontana
The Sociology Department and the Feminism and Pornography Research Cluster present:
“Screening Sex in the 1970s: Behind the Scenes at the Birth of Hardcore Cinema”
A Conversation with Filmmaker and Cinematographer Jon Fontana
Monday, April 25th, 12:30-2:00pm, College Eight, Room 301
What was it like to make feature-length, explicit adult movies before the dawn of porno-chic? Jon Fontana, a cinematographer with four decades of experience in the film industry, will discuss his trials and triumphs making hardcore pornography in the genre’s earliest years. An important behind-the-scenes player in San Francisco’s ’70s-era porn scene, Fontana worked closely with the Mitchell Brothers and was involved in the production of several well known “Golden-Age” features, such as Behind the Green Door and Autobiography of a Flea. In conversation with the Feminism and Pornography Research Cluster, Fontana will reflect on the social and political climate that produced hardcore cinema, the atmosphere and dynamics of the early San Francisco porn scene, and the creative visions and values that informed his work. By sharing first-hand experiences, Fontana will help us learn how pornographers have responded to and shaped the politics of sexuality, gender, and race since the birth of hardcore cinema.
Patricia Clough
Inaugural Lecture for the Affect Working Group:
Patricia Clough
Professor of Sociology, Women’s Studies, and Intercultural Studies at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
“War by Other Means: What Difference Do(es) the Graphic(s) Make?
Monday, April 18, 2011 / 12:30-2:00pm / Room 301 College 8
Patricia T. Clough’s books include Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (Minnesota 2000), Feminist Thought: Desire, Power and Academic Discourse (co-edited with Charles Lemert, J.W. Wiley, 1995) and The End(s) of Ethnography (Peter Lang 1992, revised 1998). Her most recent book, co-edited with Jean Halley, is The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Duke 2007).
- Patricia Clough on Probabilities, Predictions andProphecies, Part 2, The New School
- Patricia Clough on the internet as playground and factory
- Clough and Han: Metronome Beating
Sponsored by the Affect Working Group, the Department of Sociology, and the Center for Cultural Studies.
For more information on this event and/or future events of the Affect Working Group please contact Prof. D. Gould (dbgould@ucsc.edu) or Prof. D. Takagi (takagi@ucsc.edu) or Prof. C. Freccero (freccero@ucsc.edu).
Professional Development
The Sociology Department invites you to:
A Professional Development Colloquium: JOB TALKS & INTERVIEWS
featuring: Debbie Gould, Marcos Lopez, Dana Takagi, & Candace West
Monday, April 11, 12:30pm – 2:00pm / College Eight, Room 301
What do you need to know before going on the academic job market? Debbie, Marcos, Dana, and Candace will share helpful hints with graduate students preparing to deliver job talks and to interview for academic positions. Dana and Candace have extensive experience evaluating the performance of potential job candidates, Marcos has just navigated the job market successfully, and Debbie has worked on both sides of the process in recent years. During this panel discussion, they will share their perspectives and answer your questions.
Heather Love
HEATHER LOVE
Associate Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania
“Practices of Description: Goffman’s Method and Histories of Reading in the Social Sciences”
With a response by Marcia Millman, Professor of Sociology, UCSC
Monday, Feb. 7, 2011 / 12:30 – 2:00 / College Eight Room 301
Heather Love is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Her areas of interest include gender studies and queer theory, the literature and culture of modernity, affect studies, film and visual culture, psychoanalysis, race and ethnicity, sociology and literature, and critical theory. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard, 2007). She is editor of a recent special issue of GLQ about the work and legacy of anthropologist Gayle Rubin (“Rethinking Sex”) and the co-editor of a special issue of New Literary History (“Is There Life after Identity Politics?”). This year she is a fellow at the Stanford Humanities and, in the fall quarter, part of a UCHRI working group on Critical Disability Studies. She is currently writing on a book on the source materials for Erving Goffman’s 1963 book, Stigma: On the Management of Spoiled Identity (“The Stigma Archive”).
Sponsored by the Sociology Department as a part of the Sociology Department’s regular Colloquium Series. Co-sponsored by the Affect Studies Working Group.
Whose City? Labor and the Right to the City Movements
A one-day conference at the University of California Santa Cruz
- February 26, 2011
- 9:30 am – 5:00 pm
- Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206
The right to the city is…far more than a right of individual access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city more after our heart’s desire. It is, moreover, a collective rather than an individual right since changing the city inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power over the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake ourselves and our cities is…one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights. – David Harvey, 2008
Workers, environmentalists, and urban social movements have recently converged under a new banner: “the right to the city.” The phrase refers to the right of city dwellers—now the world’s majority—to democratically control development and resources in the cities in which they live . In today’s global economy, this “right” is profoundly challenged. Social divisions are experienced increasingly in spatial terms—through gentrified housing markets and polarized job markets; unequal access to green space and unequal exposure to environmental risk; new modes of segregation and policing public space. Against this backdrop, the process of urbanization itself has become a site of political contestation, and the fight for the “right to the city” both a critique and call to organize. Bringing together leading scholars, practitioners, and activists from across California and the U.S., “Whose City?” will provide an opportunity to think critically and creatively about these emerging coalitions—from their historic roots to their possible futures, from their major challenges to their major victories, from their local to their global manifestations.
FOR THE CONFERENCE SCHEDULE & ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://urban.ihr.ucsc.edu/events/whose-city/
David Harvey
The Sociology Department invites faculty and students in the UCSC Sociology Department to attend:
A Colloquium with David Harvey
Friday, February 25, 2011 // 12:30-2:00 // 301 College 8.
Copies of his recent book Enigma of Capital may be available for purchase at the event. Click here to view an animated version of the book’s thesis.
Space is limited. Contact Miriam Greenberg (miriam[at]ucsc.edu) in advance if you would like to attend.
Sarah Banet Wiser
The UCSC Sociology Department is pleased to present:
SARAH BANET WEISER
Associate Professor in the School of Communication and the department of American Studies and Ethnicity, USC Annenberg
“Branding the Post-Feminist Self: Girls’ Video Production and YouTube “
Monday, February 14, 2011: 12:30 – 2:00
College Eight Room 301
Sarah Banet-Weiser is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication at USC Annenberg and the department of American Studies and Ethnicity. Her teaching and research interests include feminist theory, race and the media, youth culture, popular and consumer culture, and citizenship and national identity. She teaches courses in culture and communication, gender and media, youth culture, feminist theory and cultural studies. She is the author of numerous books, including: The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (University of California Press, 1999); Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (Duke University Press, 2007), Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting, co-edited with Cynthia Chris and Anthony Freitas (New York University Press, 2007) and two current book projects, Authentic TM: Political Possibility in a Brand Culture (New York University Press, forthcoming), and a co-edited book, Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times, co-edited with Roopali Muhkerjee, under contract with New York University Press (forthcoming 2011). She has published articles in the academic journals Critical Studies and Media Communication, Feminist Theory, the International Journal of Communication, and Television and New Media, among others, and co-edits, with Kent Ono, a book series with New York University Press, “Critical Cultural Communication,” and is the editor of American Quarterly.
