Yale’s Center for Cultural Sociology (CCS) provides a focus for meaning-centered analysis in the social science tradition. The CCS incorporates scholars from diverse backgrounds, sharing an interest in understanding how culture informs and structures social life and its problems. Read more »
Making Terrorists Racists:
The Culture of Secrecy in Britain’s Domestic Counter-Terrorism Policy, 2001-2008
The relationship between the cognitive schemas policy elites use to interpret social problems and the “frames” they articulate to communicate policy solutions to the public remains poorly understood. Because much of the policy process is hidden behind closed doors, I argue that a theory of secrecy is needed to explain how frames evolve. Read more »
Jeffrey Alexander will give a lecture titled “Barack Obama Becomes a Hero: Performing the Democratic Struggle for Power in 2008,” at the Graduate School’s In the Company of Scholars Lecture series.
The event will take place on Tuesday, November 17, at 4 p.m. in room 119 of the Hall of Graduate Studies
A reception will follow in the McDougal Center Common Room.
Hosted by Jon Butler, Dean, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Gendering Political Legitimacy: The Case of Nancy Pelosi
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The Armed Forces in Transformation: Organisation and Culture
Anthony King has been studying the armed forces since 2003. The two papers – one on commemoration and one on the organisational transformation of Europe’s headquarters – grow out of this work. The papers examine two very different but potentially interrelated changes in military operations. Read more »
See Jeffrey Alexander’s recent article, “On the Autonomy of the Aesthetic: Witkin I versus Witkin II” and the reply by CCS Faculty Fellow Robert Witkin online at Music and Arts in Action (MAiA)
The Cultural Organisation of the Undead:
Haitian Voodoo, Life-Death Liminality and the Social Uses of the Zombie
Most representations of zombies occur in the realm of popular fictions. But what happens when the undead escape from the confines of popular culture and enter into realms where their presence is regarded as unwanted intrusion and uncanny intervention? What transgressions occur when the zombie leaves the world of horror films and dime-novels, and starts to stalk the halls of academia?
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The Hermeneutical Approach in the ‘Subjective Critique’
This paper is the first of a series of three papers I wrote advocating the hermeneutical approach. The other two are titled “The hermeneutical dialogue and the empiricist and (post-) structualist notions of objectivity” and “The linguistic base, some concrete theoretical images, and the special value for Chinese self-conscious social sciences of the hermeneutical approach.”
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