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 »
“Ya Latif…Do Not Separate Us from Our Brothers, the Berbers:”
Staging Arabo-Islamic National Identity in Interwar Morocco
This article employs a process approach to the study of nationalism, analyzing anti-colonial protest in interwar Morocco to answer the elusive question of why elite-constructed national identity resonates for larger audiences. Drawing on cultural sociological tools developed to analyze social performances, it examines how a Muslim prayer ritual was repurposed by Moroccan nationalists to galvanize mass protest against a French divide-and-rule colonial policy they believed threatened Morocco’s ethno-religious national unity. Read more »
The History of 10%: Measurement and the Politics of Gay Identity
Global Cities: A Cultural Perspective
Binaries as Thin Description
Societal Violence in Cultural Terms
This paper formulates a plausible explanation to why a seemingly average young man in Norway acted out the killing of 77 people in two acts of violence on the 22nd of June 2011. The bombing against the governmental buildings and the mass murder of Norwegian children and youth in Oslo and at Utoeya on the 22nd of June 2011 are by some considered to be acts by a “lone wolf” or “mad man” and by some the act of a terrorist. Read more »
Representational Campaigns: A New Agenda for Social Movement Studies
Predecessor Selection: Insights from and for Memory Studies
While this workshop piece covers a broad range of issues relating to memory studies (and covers some issues we discussed on my last visit), I am sending it because it provides the background from which two new (for me) interests have emerged. Read more »