Center for Cultural Sociology

Grzegorz Brzozowski
University of Warsaw

Grzegorz Brzozowski is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw. He participated in a number of Summer Schools on the topic of religion in public life (including Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen 2010, UCSIA 2011, New School TCDS 2011). He was a Visiting researcher at Freie Universität Berlin (April-May 2012) and is currently a visiting graduate student at Yale University (since February 2013), where he is affiliated with Center for Cultural Sociology.

He works on the topic of ritual-like festive events in the contemporary Polish public sphere. His academic interests include anthropology of performance, methodologies of visual research, neo-Durkheimian sociology of religion and post-secular theories of public sphere. His recent article is: Spatiality and the Performance of Belief: The Public Square and the Collective Mourning for John Paul II (Journal of Contemporary Religion, 2013). Currently he became a member of the international research group “Reassembling Democracy: Ritual as Cultural Resource” organized by University of Oslo.

He also works as a documentary director, graduated from Andrzej Wajda Master School of Film Directing (2010), with a movie Today in Warsaw, Tomorrow Whatever. He participated in a number of documentary workshops (VGIK Summer School 2009), having his projects shown in Israel, Sweden and France (Cannes Short Film Corner). Since 2011, he works as an editor of Kultura Liberalna, a Polish intellectual weekly online journal, where he also published a number of articles on the role of performative religion in Polish public sphere and pop-culture.
(CCS Visiting Graduate Student, Spring 2013)

Dick Houtman
Erasmus University, Rotterdam

Dick Houtman is Professor of Cultural Sociology at the Center for Rotterdam Cultural Sociology (CROCUS) at Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He also co-directs Erasmus University’s research master Sociology of Culture, Media and the Arts, a joint initiative by researchers from the departments of Sociology, Media, and Arts and Culture Studies.

His principal research interest is how, especially since the so-called counter culture of the 1960s, processes of disenchantment (Max Weber) and the cultural discontents following in their wake have sparked a massive Romantic turn in Western culture. Central features of the latter are high appreciations for personal liberty and authenticity, for personal experience as opposed to faith and reason, and for otherworldly and counterfactual myths and fantasy worlds. This Romantic turn evokes contestations about the authority of science and religion alike and does as such lead to new cultural conflicts that go well beyond modernity’s notorious religion-science conflict.

Many of Dick Houtman’s publications in the last five years have addressed either the emergence of a new political culture, organized around cultural rather than class issues, or the shift from church-based religion to institutionally unaffiliated spiritualities of life. About processes of political change he has published in journals like Politics and Society, Urban Affairs Review, European Journal of Political Research, Journal of European Social Policy, Social Forces and Public Opinion Quarterly (often with Peter Achterberg). About the spiritual turn he has published in, among others, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Information, Communication and Society, Social Compass, Journal of Contemporary Religion and Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion (often with Stef Aupers).

His most recent international books are Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality (2012, co-edited with Birgit Meyer), Paradoxes of Individualization: Social Control and Social Conflict in Contemporary Modernity (2011, co-authored with Stef Aupers and Willem de Koster), Religions of Modernity: Relocating the Sacred to the Self and the Digital (2010, co-edited with Stef Aupers), and Farewell to the Leftist Working Class (2008, co-authored with Peter Achterberg and Anton Derks). See his website for more details and a full and up-to-date overview of his publications.
(CCS Visiting Fellow, Academic Year 2012-13)

Daniel Gutiérrez Martínez
El Colegio Mexiquense

Daniel is a Research-Professor full time and at El Colegio Mexiquense a.c. Toluca Estado de México (www.cmq.edu.mx) and Associated professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He got his PHD in l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales de Paris, France in Sociology of religion and a PHD in El Colegio de México a.c. in Social Sciences in Sociology of education. He got a Master in Paris I Sorbonne in Economical Sociology and an Undergraduate Studies at Paris V Sorbone René Descartes in Etnosociology. He published several books and academics articles concerning the thematic of Multiculturalism, Ethnicity, Religiosity, Identities, Education, Theory and epistemology in Latin America and Western Europe. He is a associated research at the Centre d’Action et DIntervention Sociologique (CADIS)-EHESS, France and a research member at the Center of Studies of Actuality and Every day life (CEAQ) at Sorbonne University. He is member of the Research Committee 22 (Sociology of religion) at the International Sociological Association, and co-director of Libertades laicas Latin-American association (www.libertadeslaicas.org).
(CCS Visiting Fellow, September 2012 to February 2013)

Ying Xaio
Shanghai University

Ying Xiao is professor of the Department of Sociology, Shanghai University, China. He also is the executive-editor-in-chief of Chinese Journal of Sociology (CJS). He got his PHD in Sociology from Graduate School, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (GSCASS).

Ying Xiao’s main research interest is social theory. His published papers and works are on the following topics: reflexivity, risk society, social identity, civil society, and meta-theory of sociology. He combed the multi meanings and confused usages of the term reflexivity and constructed a category “self-reflection and self-refutation” as an analytical tool to study the meta-theory of sociology and explain the theoretical logic of risk society of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens. On civil society, he traced back to the different origins — political orientation and economic orientation — of civil society thoughts in Europe and discussed the internal tension in modern civil society.

Ying Xiao is studying the cultural foundation of individualism in China. In this research, he tries to explore (1) the history, cultural and social consequences, and modern transformation of “chaxugeju”(差序格局), (2) the complicated relations among collectivism, individualism, and selfishness in the context of “chaxugeju”.
(CCS Visiting Fellow, December 2012- November 2013)

Jiang Zhang
School of Social Development and Social Policy, Fudan University

Jiang Zhang is currently a Ph.D Candidate in sociology at Fudan University, Shanghai, China. His interests include civil society, collective memory, identity, religion, as well as media, all of which are centred on the cultural logic of Chinese society. His previous research was on the setting up of the Party branch in private enterprises. He is now working on the proposal which studies the discourse, coding practice represented in Micro-blog(Weibo). Jiang commits all his academic enterprise to uncovering the ways Chinese people gain self-understanding and are motivated to action, in cultural terms.
(CCS Visiting Graduate Student, January – June, 2013)

Martina Cvajner
Fulbright Post-Doctoral Scholar, Yale University Department of Sociology

(CCS Visiting Post-Doctoral Fellow, 2012-2-13 Academic Year)

Radim Marada
Masaryk University

Radim Marada gained his PhD in sociology at the New School for Social Research in 1995. Since 1993, he has been working as a teacher and researcher at the Department of Sociology of the Masaryk University, and he chaired the Department from 2003 to 2011. In 1999-2003, he also acted as the Vice-Dean for Distance Learning at the Masaryk University’s Faculty of Social Studies. From 2005 to 2011, he led the research team Ethnization-Migration-Identity within the MU’s Institute for the Research on Social Reproduction and Integration. Since 2000 until 2011, he also acted as the Editor in Chief of an academic journal Social Studies published by the Masaryk University. His major areas of interest are sociological theory and history of social thought, cultural sociology, generations and generational conflict, civil society and collective memory. More recently, he has been conducting research in the fields of urban memory, generational imagination and education of ethnic minorities. Among his publications, are The Culture of Protest: Politicization of Everyday Life (2003) and Ethnic Diversity and Civic Unity (2006, editor).
(CCS Visiting Faculty Fellow (Fulbright), March – November, 2012)

Richard Badham
Macquarie University

Dr Richard Badham is currently a Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Macquarie Graduate School of Management in Sydney. His doctoral research on theories of post-industrialism was undertaken under Professor Margaret Archer at the University of Warwick (1978-82), he was a von Humboldt Fellow at the Technical University and Wissenschaftcentrum Berlin at the time the Wall came down (1989-91), and was appointed as the Foundation BHP Professor of Management at the University of Wollongong (1996-2002). His research has covered the areas of macro-social theories of late modernity; politics and sociology of science and technology; organisational politics, innovation and cultural change;, and irony and performance in late modern organisations. He is the author of Theories of Industrial Society (Croom Helm, 1986), Power, Politics and Organizational Change (with David Buchanan( (Sage, 2008) and over 100 publications on the sociology of post-industrialism, innovation and organizational change. A recent popularisation of his research on metaphor and the social construction of leadership was published in the Harvard Business Review (November 2011). He is currently working on a book on The Ironic Manager: Irony and Performance in Late Modernity.
(CCS Visiting Fellow, Fall 2012)

Ruth Sheldon
University of Kent

Ruth Sheldon’s research interests include the cultural sociology of emotions, social conflict and the sociology of morality. Her doctoral thesis is a comparative ethnographic study of student activism relating to Israel-Palestine within British universities. This research offers an empirical analysis of the ways in which sacred forms relating to Israel-Palestine are refracted by higher education institutions, British civil society and everyday student life. Ruth’s research seeks to contribute to the cultural-pragmatic theorisation of social conflict and to explore the potential of ethnographic methods for the sociological study of the sacred. Ruth has worked at the Institute for Public Policy Research and the National Centre for Social Research in the UK. She previously completed a B.A. in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford and an M.A. in Continental Philosophy from the University of Essex.
(CCS Visiting Graduate Student, Fall 2012)

Marta Kolankiewicz
Lund University

Marta Kolankiewicz is a PhD Candidate in sociology at Lund University in Sweden, where she is writing her dissertation on anti-Muslim racism. She has previously researched on anti-Semitism, racism, human rights and transitional justice, both in academia and for NGOs and international organisations. Her interests include cultural trauma, collective memory, identity, social inqualities, as well as postcolonial and feminist theories. Among her publications are book chapters on discourse analysis and racism and an article on anthropological fieldwork.
(CCS Visiting Graduate Student, Fall 2012)

Julia Rozanova
University of British Columbia

My program of research aims to illuminate ways in which culture influences health and well-being in later life, and is focused on making a theoretical contribution to cultural sociology through engaging with the concepts of Time and Change, diachronically over the individuals’ lifespan, and historically over the life course of societies. I received my PhD in Sociology from the University of Alberta and did my Postdoctoral training at Brown University, following which I have been conducting research into the cultures of successful aging at the University of British Columbia and at Yale University, where I was profoundly inspired by the work of Jeffrey Alexander and of Becca Levy. My program of research embraces a number of interconnected projects that form three major strands: cultural determinants of inequalities of successful aging; changing meanings of health, aging, and old age over time; and interventions that improve aging health. In crafting the architecture of this research program, I draw on collaborations I have built overtime across disciplinary fields with colleagues from psychology, psychiatry, gerontology, and history.

My program of research is designed as a space to provide advanced mentorship for junior scholars, and I currently supervise five Masters students, one doctoral student, and one postdoctoral fellow. Much of my earlier work and publications have explored portrayals of aging in the social media. My empirical research was the first to illuminate the socially controversial dimensions and inequalities of successful aging, and was acknowledged by awards from the Institute of Aging of the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, and from the Gerontological Society of America. My current work builds a cultural sociological theory of ageism, and examines the Cultural Revolution of Age Relations that happened in the late 18th century America and led to the inception of successful aging as the most powerful cultural ideology of the lifecourse. I am also involved in the study of American veterans’ meaning-making of successful aging and the effect of trauma in this process (with Steven Southwick and Robert Pieterzak from the Yale Department of Psychiatry), and I am Principal Investigator (with Laura Hurd Clarke from the UBC School of Human Kinetics as Co-Investigator) of the Relationship Opportunities for Mature Adults Navigating CyberspacE (ROMANCE) three year project, that focuses on deconstructing the subjective and cultural meanings of the online quest for love life in the cultural scenarios and blueprints for successful aging in the 21st century.

In addition, my emerging theoretical work within the cultural sociology tradition furthers the concepts of the Agentic Aging and the Embodiment, both of which have profound implications on how the public policy and social welfare are going to be reorganized in the American society. As the first Baby Boomer cohort reached retirement age in 2011 and the years to come are going to see an even more unprecedented surge of interest in aging issues, I look forward to advancing cultural sociological theory through putting cultural determinants of healthy aging on its research agenda.
(Visiting Independent Researcher, Academic year 2012-13)