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 »
Cultural Reasons for Inequality: Testing the explanatory narratives of the upper class
This paper is is the first draft of what should become my second year paper. It is also the first part of what I hope becomes a bigger project looking at culture reasons behind inequality, focusing on beneficial cultural traits of the upper classes. It is both exploratory and a defense of the necessity of cultural analysis to a field that is often uninterested in it. Read more »
Assassination at City Hall
n this article I apply the theories of social drama and cultural trauma to the 1978 murder of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and city supervisor Harvey Milk. These theories help us understand and explain how and why these murders became a significant event. Read more »
The Virtue of Normal: A Case Study of Subcultural Identity
Evangelicalism has long been considered a religious subculture. Studies of the tradition emphasize ways that adherents separate themselves from mainstream culture, paying particular attention to alternative Christian media and to attempts by conservative evangelicals to mobilize political movements around explicitly religious goals. Read more »
Otherhood and Redistribution:
How the State’s approach to women’s difference impacts women’s lives.
This paper examines key acts of legislation and judicial decisions that impact health care and employment policy with the goal of understanding how their implementation succeeds or fails to redistribute to women. Read more »
“Piratically, and feloniously”:
Piracy in the Semiotic Structure of the English State, 1680-1700
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