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Schedule

Fall 2022

The workshop will be entirely virtual.

September 30, 2022 | 11am-1pm EST 

Link to join: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/7916174882

Michael Zanger-Tishler, graduate student in Sociology, Harvard University

"Theorizing Identifiability, Discrimination, and Bodily Capital: How Jews Experience and Think about Antisemitism and Philosemitism"

Abigail Mariam, graduate student in Sociology, Harvard University

"Discovering Oneself and One's Place in the World: A Theory of Collective Identity Development in Race-Based Social Movements"

October 18, 2022 | 12pm-2pm EST (Joint session with the Culture and Social Analysis Workshop) 

“Bringing the Body into Scholarship on Work & Organizations” - hybrid session (WJH 450) or zoom (register here)

Ashley Mears, Professor of Sociology, Boston University

Ellis Monk, Associate Professor of Sociology, Harvard University

Njoke Thomas, Assistant Professor of Management and Organization, Boston College's Carroll School of Management

November 4, 2022 | 12pm-2pm EST

Link to join: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/6445220007 

Taeku Lee, Bae Family Professor of Government, Harvard University

December 2, 2022 | 12pm-2pm EST

Link to join: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/7916174882

Derek Robey, graduate student in Sociology, Harvard University

"Why We Fight: The Symbolic and Material Stakes of Historical Narratives of Racism and Race"

My dissertation employs a cross-national comparison of two settler colonial societies that are projected to demographically transition to majority-minority nations in which white people comprise less than fifty percent of the national population. I use semi-structured in-depth interviews and a qualitative content analysis to analyze how residents of Boston, Minneapolis, Toronto, and Vancouver make sense of national and local trajectories of racism and race. My presentation will focus on one empirical chapter I am currently drafting. My primary question for this chapter is: What do Americans and Canadians see as the stakes of historical memory contestations? Though some scholars contend historical memory contestations are solely manifestations of "the politics of recognition," I argue recognition struggles are entangled with imagined or real struggles over the politics of material distribution. I outline how residents of four cities in Canada and the United States understand the complicated relationship between the symbolic and material stakes of contemporary sociopolitical struggles over national memory.

Chelsea King, graduate student in Sociology, Harvard University

"Interracial Boundaries in Divergent Colonial Projects"

 

Spring 2022

The workshop will be entirely virtual using the following Zoom link for all the sessions unless indicated otherwise:

https://harvard.zoom.us/j/7916174882

March 1, 2022 | 12pm-2pm EST (Joint session with the Culture and Social Analysis Workshop)

Waverly Duck, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Pittsburgh

Anne Rawls, Professor of Sociology, Bentley University

Iddo Tavory, Associate Professor of Sociology, New York University

Stefan Timmermans, Professor of Sociology, University of California Los Angeles

Van Tran, Associate Professor of Sociology, City University of New York

March 4, 2022 | 12pm-2pm EST

Victoria Asbury, Graduate Student of Sociology, Harvard University

"The Role of Message Agreement in Perceptions of Factuality in Political Discourse About Immigrants"

Public susceptibility to false information has garnered much attention in recent years. Undergirding challenges in information evaluation is the basic task of determining if the content one is consuming is objective or subjective. Drawing on an original national-wide survey featuring a probability-based sample of U.S. adults, I show how beliefs and partisanship lead to divergent perceptions about the factuality of prototypical political speech regarding one of the most important issues of the day: immigration. The messages in this study are informed by original computational text analyses of nearly 28,000 political documents from national Democratic and Republican lawmakers. I find that Democrats and Republicans are most likely to characterize the message that aligns with their party position as fact and the message aligned with the other party’s as opinion. However, after controlling for one’s agreement, most people are likely to characterize both messages as opinion. Results indicate a substantial reliance on one’s personal agreement with a message and political identity in evaluations of factuality in political speech.

Aaron Brennen Benavidez, Graduate Student of Sociology, Harvard University

"Institutional Stigmatization: An Historical Assessment of Two Community Colleges in Boston"

The community college stands as one of few democratic, open-access educational institutions offering adults, particularly first-generation, low-income, minority students, opportunities to make foundational inroads toward the completion of more advanced degrees. According to National Center for Education Statistics and National Student Clearinghouse data, 80 percent of first-time community college students intend to earn a bachelor’s degree, making community college an important perceived pathway toward the dream of transferring to a four-year college. In Boston, Bunker Hill Community College (BHCC) and Roxbury Community College (RCC) opened their doors the very same month in 1973—making them well-poised for comparative historical analysis. This preliminary research assesses historical documents and explores the potential utility of institutional stigmatization as a generative concept toward explaining both local and extra-local college trajectories.

​​March 25, 2022 | 12pm-2pm EST

Maria Abascal, Assistant Professor of Sociology, New York University

Abstract: What do people mean when they use the term "diversity" to describe real communities? "Diversity" can refer to multiple differences—ethnoracial, economic, etc. It may also refer to multiple dimensions of the same difference, i.e., heterogeneity or group representation. Analyzing a survey of Chicago area residents, we ask: (1) When people describe a community as diverse, on which kinds of differences are they drawing? (2) Within each relevant difference, are evaluations of diversity predicted by heterogeneity, the share of specific groups, or both? Findings suggest respondents associate diversity primarily with a community’s ethnoracial attributes and secondarily with its economic attributes. Within ethnoracial attributes, both heterogeneity and the share of disadvantaged ethnoracial groups, especially Blacks, predict assessed diversity. Within economic attributes, income inequality negatively predicts assessed diversity; the representation of poor people does not. Qualitative responses reveal varied understandings of diversity while confirming the dominance of ethnoracial attributes.

April 8, 2022 | 12pm-2pm EST

Michael Rodriguez-Muñiz, Assistant Pofessor of Sociology and Latina/Latino Studies, Northwestern University

"A Few Bad Apples or A Rotten Tree?: Racial State Frames in Times of Racialized Political Distrust"   

Paper co-authored with Julie A. Dowling (University of Illinois, Chicago) and G. Cristina Mora (University of California, Berkeley)

Research on political trust has uncovered a “trust gap” among ethnoracial populations, with some populations having stronger levels of trust in government and other populations having stronger levels of political distrust. Yet, to date, scholars have been hard-pressed to explain the role of race and racialization. On the one hand, leading political theories tend to overlook or minimize these issues. On the other hand, empirical research has largely assumed a direct relationship between racialization and political trust. Drawing on a dataset of 71 interviews with Latino/a/x residents in Chicago and the San Francisco Bay area collected during 2019-2020, this talk will present an alternative and more sociologically grounded account. We argue that understanding and explaining the sources and scopes of political (dis)trust demands an account of the interpretive frameworks—or racial state frames—through which social actors variously interpret and ascribe racialized meaning to government officials and state bureaucracies. As part of a broader theoretical model, this concept can help scholars begin to better address within and across population variation in political trust.

April 15, 2022 | 12pm-2pm EST

Clem Aeppli, Graduate Student of Sociology, Harvard University

The Structure of Racial Earnings Inequality in the Early 20th Century

How do we explain racial earnings inequality in the early 20th-Century U.S.? I break explanations for racial earnings inequality in the early 20th Century into two camps, depending on whether they emphasize disparities between workplaces or disparities within workplaces. For example, employer refusal to hire Black workers falls into the former, while a theory of whites hoarding resources in a firm falls into the latter. This theoretical distinction is important because the structure of the economy changed drastically in the early 20th Century: firms grew larger, more complicated, and more hierarchically organized, shifting the primary axis of economic stratification from between-firm to within-firm. My study proceeds in two steps. In the first step, I find using Census records that, from 1900 to 1930, racial inequality was recast along occupational lines – a trend driven by industries with larger firms and greater capital intensity. In the second step, I digitize and examine a unique 1918 survey of manufacturing establishments in three cities. Already by 1918, establishment sorting accounted for practically none of the overall racial wage gap in manufacturing in those cities, putting into question the significance of the between-firm theories. The overall racial pay gap arose almost entirely from inequalities within establishments, which actually grew larger in higher-paying and more modernized establishments. These findings confirm the significance of within-firm explanations in an era of workplace hierarchization and formalization, and underscore the importance of historical context for theories of racial economic inequality.

Andre Marega Pinhel, Visiting Researcher, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

"Racial inequities and health studies: a framework for analysis and intervention"

This thesisaddresses the issue of racial inequities in public health and proposesa framework for future research and policy design. In recent years the social idea of  race  has  beenconsidered  in quantitativehealth care studies  as  oneof  thedeterminantsof inequities  outcomes.  However, the  extent  of  these racial determinants and the protocols for theirmeasurement are currently under debate. The   self-reported   race   is   themain   input   to   collect   these   data, but   the implementationof  this  variable facesmany dilemmas.What  kind  of inferences can be drawn from the racial reports of the patients?The framework anchorsits findingsin  comparative  sociology:  first,  between  US  and  Brazil,  and  secondly, between  Brazilian  regions. Research  results  indicate multiple  studies  debating racial  inequities  in  health  in the US,  but  also difficulties  to  gather  data  that  is scattered  on  many  databases.  Brazil, on  the other  hand,  has  a  national  public health systemthat collectsracial reportsunder the same protocols but lacksthe concepts to analyzethese  data. There  is  alsoevidence  that underreportsof patients’race canvary acrosshealth facilities in the same network,indicating that street-level bureaucracy plays a major role in collectingthese data. We hope that this research can contribute to improving these databases and propose policies to mitigate racial inequities in public health.

 

Spring 2020

 

February 14, 2020 (co-sponsored with the Working Group in Political Psychology and Behavior)

Valerie Purdie Greenaway, Associate Professor of Psychology, Columbia University
talk title to come

NOTE LOCATION CHANGE (for this meeting only): CGIS S354

February 28, 2020

Matthew Kearney, Lecturer, Department of Sociology, Harvard University
"​​​​​Race and Gender Depiction in American Film"

Hunter E. Rendleman, PhD student, Department of Government, Harvard University
"The Social Construction of Race: Evidence using a Conjoint Experiment"

​​April 3, 2020

Mina Cikara, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard University
talk title to come

April 17, 2020

Jose Itzigsohn, Professor of Sociology, Brown University
talk title to come

Spring 2019

February 8, 2019

  • Charlotte Lloyd, Graduate Student, Department of Sociology, Harvard University 
  • Anna Skarpelis, Postdoctoral Fellow, Reischauer Institute, Harvard University 

February 22, 2019

  • Maria Abascal, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Columbia University
    • Title: "Demographic Threat and the Classification of Racially Ambiguous People"

March 8, 2019

  • Sarah Mayorga-Gallo, Assistant Professor, Sociology, University of Massachusetts — Boston
    • Title: "How whiteness shapes multiracial spaces: Lessons from Behind the White Picket Fence"

April 5, 2019

  • Camille Z. Charles, Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania
    • Title: "Diversity from Within: A Descriptive Portrait of Millennial Black Elites"

April 19, 2019

  • Gregory Davis, Graduate Student, Department of African & African American Studies, Harvard University
  • Anjie Chan Tack, Graduate Student, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago

 

Fall 2018

September 7, 2018

  • Alex Bell, Graduate Student in Economics, Harvard University
    • "Experimental Evidence on the Long-Run Effects of Mentors"
  • Victoria Asbury, Graduate Student in Sociology, Harvard University

September 21, 2018

  • Rene Flores, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago
    • "Who are the ’illegals’?: The Social Construction of Illegality in the U.S."

Tuesday, October 2, 2018- Co-Sponsored Event with the Culture and Social Analysis Workshop

  • Jessica Welburn, Assistant Professor, Departments of Sociology & African American Studies, The University of Iowa
    • "Almost Lost Detroit: African Americans' Responses to the Individualization of Risk in the Motor City"
    • Tuesday, October 2, 2018, 12:00pm to 2:00pm, WJH 450

October 5, 2018

  • Spencer Piston, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Boston University
    • "Shades of Humanity: White Americans Who Dehumanize Blacks"

October 19, 2018

  • Van Tran, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Columbia University
    • "Asian Americans and Affirmative Action Policy"

November 2, 2018

  • Phillip Atiba Goff, Professor, Center for Policing Equity, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
    • "Building a COMPSTAT for Racism"

Spring 2018

January 26, 2018

  • Ibram X. Kendi, Professor of History and International Relations, American University
    • "How to be An Antiracist"
    • THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED

February 9, 2018

  • Demar F. Lewis IV, Yale University
    • "Making Sense of the Numbers: A Du Boisian Approach to Interpreting Modern Social Reintegration Statistics"
  • Suraj Yengde, Phd, Harvard University 
    • "Thinking Caste, Thinking Race: Du Bois, Ambedkar and Fanon"

February 23, 2018

  • Sa-kiera Hudson, Harvard University
    • "The Influence of Sexual Orientation and Race on Gender Prescriptive Stereotypes" 
  • Gregory Keith Davis, Harvard University
    • "The hierarchy-affecting force of racial identification in Donald Trump’s presidential victory"

March 9, 2018

  • Dr. Robert W. Livingston, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University 
    • “Paths to Progress: Moving the Needle on Racial Justice in the U.S.”

March 30, 2018

  • Edward Telles, Professor, Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara
    • "Race among Latinos and Latin Americans"

April 13, 2018

  • James Sidanius, Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard University
    • “The Theory of Gendered Prejudice: A Social Dominance and Intersectional Perspective”

 

Fall 2017

September 8, 2017

  • Lawrence D. Bobo (Sociology) & James Sidanius (Psychology)- Harvard University
    • "Racialized Politics: Revisiting the Debate About Racism in America"
  • Robert Manduca - Harvard University
    • "Income Concentration and the Persistent Black-White Earnings Gap"

September 22, 2017

  • Tiffany Nichols - Harvard University
    • "Blumenbach versus Montagu: How Courts Have Relied on Anthropological Concepts of Race"
  • Monique Golden - University of Connecticut
    • "Who’s Missing from School Choice Research?: African American Girls’ School Choice Decisions"

October 6, 2017 

  • Brainstorming session for early stage works (e.g. fellowship application, prospectus, etc)
    • 4-6 slots available; email Victoria and Mo if you are interested in workshopping your idea (ideal for early Gs)

October 20, 2017

November 3, 2017

  • Ellis Monk, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Princeton University
    • "The Consequences of Race, Color, and Bodily Capital in the U.S. & Brazil"

November 17, 2017

  • Victor Rios, Professor, Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara
    • "Human Targets: The Role of Culture in Racialized Punitive Social Control"

 

Workshops are held bi-weekly on Fridays from 12-2p at Willian James Hall in room 1550. Lunch is provided.

Additional reading discussions and focused dialogues to be announced throughout the semester.

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