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

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 »

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?
Read more »

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.”
Read more »

Dear CCS fellow travelers,

I’m attaching recent samples of my work that will be published soon. One is a piece about silence (to be published in Social Forces) and the other one is the introduction to my new book Yitzhak Rabin’s Assassination and the Dilemmas of Commemoration (State University of New York Press). The good news for this week’s session is that you don’t have to read either of these (although feedbacks and comments are always welcome).
Read more »

For millions of Chinese who had the misfortune to live during the span of the War of Resistance Against Japan (1937-1945), their personal experience must have been unbearably traumatic and painful. During the 8 years of the war, China lost three million lives in combat, and the civilian casualties is estimated to be about twenty million. And the heinous nature of the war atrocity committed by the invading army must have left indelible marks on memories and consciousness of millions of war victims, of which the Nanking Massacre and the crimes of No. 731 Special Forces are but two particularly atrocious cases. Such massively shared suffering and injustice, however, as vivid as it must have been in each war victims’ minds, remained ultimately private and individual: for many years after the building of the new state, it seldom if ever, found its way into the public sphere of expression.
Read more »

This paper takes a critical look at the argumentation and claims of the sociology of knowledge from Mannheim to Bourdieu and how it relates (or better doesn’t relate) to competing strong programs such as Cambridge-style intellectual history and (mainly) German-based conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte).
Read more »