Category: Announcements

Symposium: Empire, Memory, Violence, and the Sociological Imagination

On By Annika WilcoxIn Announcements, New York 2019Leave a comment
Empire, Memory, Violence, and the Sociological Imagination
Thursday, August 8, 2019
CUNY Graduate Center
Skylight Room (Rm. 9100)

Any theorization of the social that is oriented towards emancipation necessitates an interrogation of empire, memory, violence, and the ways they have come to constitute the fabric of social life. What kinds of critical projects do the defining and study of these keywords enable? This symposium puts into conversation interdisciplinary thinkers who have developed friendships by and through grappling with what the terms empire, memory, and violence mean for them personally and politically. By discussing each of these keywords in pairs, our speakers trace new ways of understanding and mobilizing these terms. By centering friendship as both a condition and a locus of epistemic insight, we hope to build a sociological grammar that disrupts the divisiveness of empire and its reverberating legacies and inheritances. These conversations can serve as a collective rubric for rewriting the sociological imagination, underscoring the intellectual and political stakes of our work in imperial times.

This event is free and open to the public. The building is wheelchair-accessible. RSVP via the Facebook event page.

Member Publication

On By Annika WilcoxIn Announcements, PublicationsLeave a comment

Please check out the following recent publication by OOW members Laura Doering and Chris Liu: “From the Ground Up: Gender, Self-Employment, and Space in a Colombian Housing Project.” Sociology of Development. 5(2): 198-224.

ABSTRACT:

Self-employment is an important component of many development strategies aiming to enhance earnings and employment among low-income populations. However, women tend to earn less than men through self-employment, calling into question the effectiveness of self-employment as a tool for bolstering women’s earnings. In this paper, we identify a novel intervention that boosts women’s returns from self-employment and narrows the gender earnings gap in an informal, residential market. We argue that micro-spatial resources offer gender-specific advantages to female business owners. We show how gendered constraints on women’s labor market activity intersect with spatial resources to influence their likelihood of running a business and their self-employment earnings. Using data from a Colombian public housing complex, we find that the randomly assigned location of a resident’s apartment significantly influences women’s business activity, but not men’s. Women who run informal, home-based businesses from favorable locations earn more than twice as much as comparable women, narrowing the gender earnings gap by 58.5% and earning an income that lifts them above the poverty line. This study offers a new perspective on how gender and micro-geography intersect to shape self-employment. More broadly, it reveals how an important but often-overlooked factor, micro-spatial variation, influences economic development.

Member Publication

On By Annika WilcoxIn Announcements, PublicationsLeave a comment

Please check out the following recent publication by OOW member Meghan Elizabeth Kallman (in the International Public Management Journal): “Encapsulation, Professionalization and Managerialism in the Peace Corps.”

ABSTRACT:

Much recent work has explored the implications of the pervasive professionalization that has occurred in recent decades across occupations and throughout organizational life. Using the case of the US Peace Corps, the current article expands this conversation into the institutionally complex world of international development organizations. Drawing on interview, documentary, and observational data, its goal is to offer a contextual analysis of how professionalism is understood and practiced within international development. I show how the application of managerialist models have led to an “encapsulation” of ideas of professionalization, and demonstrate how managerial encapsulation unfolds in practice. This analysis allows me to consider how encapsulation challenges and strains professional norms among Peace Corps staff. The article concludes with theoretical and practical implications.

Job Posting: Postdoctoral Research Associate at The University of Massachusetts

On By Annika WilcoxIn Announcements, Job PostingsLeave a comment

The ADVANCE-IT team at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is seeking a Postdoctoral Research Associate. The Postdoctoral Research Associate will work with an interdisciplinary team on an NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation Project. The project is entitled “Collaboration & Equity: the Resources, Relationships, and Recognition (R3) Model.” The team is focused around interventions in diversifying and supporting collaborative research, creating inclusive communities, and ensuring shared decision-making by providing resources, helping develop relationships, and ensuring recognition for collaborative work.

Duties will include: a) conducting a literature review to identify best practices in support of our interventions; b) supporting interventions on campus; c) conducting research on the impact of the interventions; d) sharing findings about the interventions through presentations and publications co-authored with members of the research team; e) creating toolkits based on successful interventions, for use at other universities; and f) assisting the PI or co-PIs in other activities associated with the ADVANCE project.

Continue reading “Job Posting: Postdoctoral Research Associate at The University of Massachusetts” →

Memorial for Art Stinchcombe (1933-2018)

On By Annika WilcoxIn Announcements, Conferences, New York, 2019Leave a comment
The Northwestern University Department of Sociology invites the colleagues, students, and friends of Art Stinchcombe, and all those influenced by his work—as well as the colleagues, students, and friends of his wife, Carol Heimer—to join us as we remember Art and pay tribute to the accomplishments of one of the leading sociologists of his day. (Art’s obituary appeared in ASA Foonotes, Volume 46, no. 4, http://www.asanet.org/sites/default/files/attach/footnotes/footnotes_sept-oct-18_0.pdf.)
 
Saturday, August 10, 7:30 pm, in the Gramercy Room at the Sheraton-New York.

Message from the ASA LGBTQ Caucus

On By Annika WilcoxIn Announcements, New York, 20191 Comment

Hello! As we gear up for another ASA Annual Meeting, we would like to encourage you to become involved with the LGBTQ Caucus. The Caucus aims to support and empower all LGBTQ sociologists, regardless of what areas they work in. Our full mission statement is on our website: https://www.lgbtqcaucus.com/about-us. At the upcoming ASA meetings, we will have paper awards and graduate travel awards, a coffee hour, a business meeting, and a reception joint with Sociologists for Trans Justice. Outside of the Annual Meeting, you can get involved via our listserv or facebook page, or by reading or contributing to our new quarterly newsletter.* You can also help us build community by telling your colleagues about the Caucus.

* The next LGBTQ Caucus Newsletter is open for submissions! Did you publish something this year that we can signal-boost for you? Do you have questions about being queer at ASA or on the job market? Do you have an announcement? Are you on the job market? If you answered yes to any of these questions, we’d love to hear from you. Please email us at soclgbtqcaucus@gmail.com.