Michigan Stone Center Call for Visiting Fellow Applications

The Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics (CID) at the University of Michigan is now accepting applications for a Visiting Fellow for the 2025-26 academic year. CID aims to produce cutting-edge research on social inequality, especially wealth inequality, train the next generation of inequality scholars, build data infrastructure, and increase data accessibility. The fellowship provides an early-career, tenure-track social scientist studying social inequality with funded time to pursue their research in an intellectual community defined by a culture of engagement and collaboration. 

Notably, we are committed to making this support equitably available to scholars, regardless of whether they are able to relocate to Ann Arbor for the year. Thus, we offer both a nonresidential and a residential option.

To learn more and apply, visit https://inequality.umich.edu/cid-visiting-fellowship/

Applications are due October 15. 

New Book: From Skepticism to Competence: How American Psychiatrists Learn Psychotherapy by Mariana Craciun

Craciun, Mariana. 2024. From Skepticism to Competence: How American Psychiatrists Learn Psychotherapy. University of Chicago Press. 

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo215859800.html

While many medical professionals can physically examine the body to identify and understand its troubles—a cardiologist can take a scan of the heart, an endocrinologist can measure hormone levels, an oncologist can locate a tumor—psychiatrists have a much harder time unlocking the inner workings of the brain or its metaphysical counterpart, the mind.  

In From Skepticism to Competence, sociologist Mariana Craciun delves into the radical uncertainty of psychiatric work by following medical residents in the field as they learn about psychotherapeutic methods. Most are skeptical at the start. While they are well equipped to treat brain diseases through prescription drugs, they must set their expectations aside and learn how to navigate their patients’ minds. Their instructors, experienced psychotherapists, help the budding psychiatrists navigate this new professional terrain by revealing the inner workings of talk and behavioral interventions and stressing their utility in a world dominated by pharmaceutical treatments. In the process, the residents examine their own doctoring assumptions and develop new competencies in psychotherapy. Exploring the world of contemporary psychiatric training, Craciun illuminates novice physicians’ struggles to understand the nature and meaning of mental illness and, with it, their own growing medical expertise.

New Publication: “Authoritarian Innovation in the United States: The Role of Dual Subnational Systems of Labor Governance” by Chris Rhomberg

Rhomberg, Chris. 2024. “Authoritarian Innovation in the United States: The Role of Dual Subnational Systems of Labor Governance.” Journal of Industrial Relations. https://doi.org/10.1177/00221856241260770

Abstract: I apply Curato and Fossati’s (2020) concept of “authoritarian innovation” to analyze historic changes in labor governance in the United States that have undermined democratic participation in the workplace and in the polity. Drawing from comparative political economy and welfare state theories, I argue that since the 1930s the U.S. has had not one unified, national labor regime but two competing, subnational regimes: the New Deal and its legacy in the industrialized North and West Coast and a counter-regime based initially in the former Confederate Southern states. The more anti-union, anti-welfare, and anti-democratic Southern regime survived the Civil Rights era of the 1960s and 1970s, gained ascendance nationally with the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s, and expanded its boundaries in the 2010s into the deindustrialized Midwest. The “dual regime” analysis highlights critical transitions and divergent paths in the reshaping of American democracy.