Junior Fellows’ Publications
Matthew Norton
“A Structural Hermeneutics of ‘The O’Reilly Factor‘” in Theory & Society, 40:315–346, 2011.
“Narrative Structure and Emotional Mobilization in Humanitarian Representations: The Case of the Congo Reform Movement, 1903-1912,” forthcoming in The Journal of Human Rights.
“Afterward, ‘The Geertz Effect’” in Interpreting Clifford Geertz: Cultural Investigation in the Social Sciences edited by Jeffrey Alexander, Philip Smith and Matthew Norton, April 2011.
Elizabeth Butler Breese
“Meaning, Celebrity, and the Underage Pregnancy of Jamie Lynn Spears,”
Cultural Sociology 4 (3): 337- 355, 2010
“Reports from ‘Backstage’ in Entertainment News,” Society 47 (5): 396- 402, 2010
Shai Dromi
Alexander, Jeffrey C. and Shai M. Dromi. “Trauma Construction and Moral Restriction: The Ambiguity of the Holocaust for Israel.” In Narrating Trauma: On the Impact of Collective Suffering, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman and Elisabeth Butler Breese. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, Forthcoming 2011.
Dromi, Shai M. and Eva Illouz. “Recovering Morality: Pragmatic Sociology and Literary Studies.” New Literary History 41 (2): 351-369, 2010.
The disciplines of sociology and literary studies have seen a renewed interest in morality and in ethics in recent decades, but there has been little dialogue between the two. Recognizing that literary works, both classical and popular, can serve as moral critiques and that readers, of all types and classes, can and often do serve as moral critics, this paper seeks to apply some insights of pragmatic sociology to the field of literature by exploring the ways in which moral claims are expressed, evaluated, and negotiated by texts and through texts by readers. Drawing on the new French pragmatic sociology, represented by sociologists such as Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, this paper claims that fiction has a twofold role in civil society. Firstly, novels serve as critiques in their ability to formalize and dramatize generalizable logics of evaluation and to elicit debates by pointing to the inadequacies of, and clashes between, such evaluative logics in the lives of their characters. Secondly, the reading public is often moved to form its own critiques of a novel, in praise or in denunciation of its content, its form, or its perceived intent, and in doing so exercises its moral capacity in the public sphere.
Carolyn Ly
“More than a Library?: Urban Poverty and an Exploratory Look at the Role of a Neighborhood Institution,” Introduction by Waverly Duck, Perspectives on Urban Education Fall 2010