I am more than happy to have the opportunity to present the outline of a section of my research on the festive events developed in Poland after 1989. This is a very initial draft of one of the planned chapters of my Ph.D. dissertation; I have completed the field work and find myself in the midst of trying to understand its outcomes with the categories of ritual-like performance and iconic power. Read more »

This is a draft chapter of a book on landscape and secularism in America, tentatively titled “The Secular Eye.” It is based on my dissertation but now has portions on both urban built environments and iconic natural landscapes. Read more »

International nongovernmental organizations (INGO’s) frequently communicate social criticism in the name of what they hold to be universal values or common humanity. In order to voice such critiques, INGO’s often present themselves as impartial spectators. This position provides them with a self-proclaimed bird’s-eye view of social circumstances from which to morally evaluate state and non-state actors. Focusing on the Red Cross Movement in its early decades (1864-1899), this chapter would like to trace this INGO’s evolvement from a relatively small group of philanthropists to a global power possessing the means to employ its moral code in diverse sites. Read more »

News media have embraced social media, most recently Twitter, in order to maintain and reclaim relevance and interpretive authority in the networked public sphere. Twitter is not a tool but affects how journalism is understood and performed by its practitioners. This paper is based on a two-year-ethnography of the New York State Government news ecosystem (C. Anderson, 2010) and traces parallel yet varying paths of adopting Twitter and refusal thereof among competing political reporters. Read more »

In this paper I discuss the role of moral authority in the politics of two regulatory settings. I explore the dynamics between sets of actors in two cases—first, between physicians and non-MD professionals on a committee of a large national medical organization, and second, between clerics and professors in the governance of the college of a large Protestant denomination. Though these two settings are quite different, they are both ones in which the actors concerned develop moral standards to govern relationships between different members of their respective communities, and ones in which there is contestation over the types of professional expertise that can be translated into moral authority. Read more »

Volume 1, Issue 1 (February 2013)

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The history of San Francisco’s Chinatown following the 1906 earthquake and fire and New Orleans’ public housing following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 reveal how powerful class interests collude with the fog of disaster to lay claim to the urban spaces of the poor and marginal. Read more »

The year 2011 saw the eruption of two significant mass mobilizations: Occupy Wall Street and the London Riots. Analysed through the literatures on social movements and deviance, the former would be characterized as a democratic movement, while the latter would be considered a threat to democratic society. A cultural sociological analysis, however, exposes both mass mobilizations to have been directed towards a democratic end. Read more »