Pre-Doctoral Fellows’ Publications
Structure, culture and community: The search for belonging in 50 urban communes.
Stephen Vaisey
Driven by the popularity of social capital theories, the concept of community has enjoyed a renaissance in sociology. Yet much research in this area relies on exclusively “structural” thinking, attributing group identification to mechanisms like the arrangement of physical space, power relations, or high investment requirements. Often neglected is a strand of theory that attributes gemeinschaft to shared moral order and culture. Using data from the Urban Communes Project, this paper directly tests the influence of both structural and cultural mechanisms in producing the the experience of community. The results show that while both structural and cultural mechanisms are correlated with high levels of gemeinschaft, the evidence supports the existence of shared moral order as the most likely proximate mechanism. Further analyses using a modified probabilistic form of Ragin’s Fuzzy Set Analysis, however, illustrate how culture and structure combine to sustain — or inhibit — the experience of community. Download PDF »
Beyond the code: New aesthetic methodologies for the sociology of the arts.
Sophia Krzys Acord
Current methodological approaches to the sociological study of art worlds have contributed to the abandonment of the artistic oeuvre from the sociology of the arts. It is time to redress this shortcoming and recover the particularity of the art work as a key, material factor in how social actors construct and experience the social world within an artistic space. Focusing on the study of curators as artistic gatekeepers, this article outlines a new visual methodology for the sociology of the arts which incorporates the use of audiovisual technology and running commentary to develop the interview as a collaborative process between informant and researcher. Download PDF »