16th Annual Junior Theorists Symposium

Thursday, August 4, 2022

University of Southern California

Please register to attend in-person here

Interested in attending virtually? Register here

Donate to support JTS: Venmo: @JTS-2022

8:30am – 9:00am PST | Light breakfast

9:00am – 10:20am PST | Panel 1: Health and the politics of knowledge

Discussant: Steven Epstein, Northwestern University

Presenters:

Jonathan Shaffer (Boston University) – “Noncommunicable Diseases Between North and South: The Double Standards of a Single Category”

Lisa Owens (Columbia University) – “Birth, Blood, and the Social Origins of Trauma”

Brandon Sward (University of Chicago) – “The colonization of media: Indigeneity, visuality, and social science in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries”

10:20am – 10:30am PST | Break

10:30am – 11:50am PST | Panel 2: Political elites, social movements, and entrepreneurialism 

Discussant: Saskia Sassen, Columbia University

Presenters:

Vrinda Marwah (University of Utah) – “The caste of our commons: Political entrepreneurialism and social structure”

Luis Flores (University of Michigan) – “Polanyi at a Tupperware Party: Marketizing Home Life and the Social Limits of “Breadwinner Liberalism”

Wendy Li (University of Wisconsin-Madison) – “What Does the Revolving Door Do? Careers, Cohesion, and Policy Networks among Political Elites”

11:50am – 12:20pm PST | Lunch begins

12:30pm – 1:50pm PST | Keynote & lunch continued

Winners of the 2020 Junior Theorist Award for “Gender and Charismatic Power”

Paul Joosse (Hong Kong University) and Robin Willey (Concordia University of Edmonton) 

2:00pm – 3:20pm PST | Panel 3: Race, categories, and temporality

Discussant: Mario Small, Columbia University

Presenters:

Jared Clemons (Duke University) and Mo Torres (Harvard University) – “Racism without Races: Sociology beyond the “Social Construction of Race”

prabhdeep singh kehal (Brown University) – “Negotiating Utopia: Ethnography and Theorizing from Entangled US Trans Subjectivities”

Sabrina Charles (New York University) – “Time and Unpredictability: Arrhythmia in Immigration Court”

3:20pm – 3:30pm PST | Break

3:30pm – 5:00pm PST | After-Panel: Theorizing Intersections

Panelists: 

Tey Meadow (Columbia University)

Tianna Paschel (University of California, Berkeley)

Vrushali Patel (Florida International University)

Mary Romero (Arizona State University)

Adia Harvey Wingfield (Washington University, St. Louis)

5:30pm PST | “Theory in the Wild”

After the Symposium, please join us for drinks at TBD

Please contact Tara Gonsalves and Davon Norris with questions: juniortheorists@gmail.com