Workshop in Cultural Sociology, 2009 – 2010
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CCS Workshop Poster – 2009-2010
Fall
Spring
Workshop 9/4: Organizational Meeting
Welcome Back!
This week we will be focused on updates and planning. We hope you can all make it to this important meeting.
We are very happy to announce that our workshop will now be held in the “new” CCS at 8 Prospect Place, room 119. (See announcement on CCS homepage)
Please come prepared to say a few words about your summer and the progress you have made in your work. This would include things like writing thesis chapters, sending papers off for publication, being published, presenting at the ASA, collecting data or making field trips, going to Konstanz. Please also share your recreational adventures as well.
This year we welcome 2 incoming students: Shai Dromi and Yasushi Tanaka. We also welcome Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Bing Xu, Visiting Fellows here for the academic year, and Andreas Hess, Visiting Fellow here for the Fall semester. Also back with us are Post-doctoral Fellows Jonathan Roberge for the academic year and Esteve Ollé Sanz, here until February 2010. We are pleased to report that Andrea Cossu, Kirsten Kraus, Sonja van Wichelen and Marc de Leeuw will join us at the workshops and other events when possible as they are all still here in New Haven, or nearby. Jenn Bryan, an applicant for a Post-doctoral appointment at the CCS, will join our workshop group this fall. We are so very pleased to have such a diverse and interesting group of visitors to work with this year.
Lunch will be served during this meeting.
Workshop 9/11: Esteve Ollé Sanz
Towards an “Open” Machine? Internet Culture and Bureaucracy
Workshop 9/18: Dominik Bartmanski
Reclaiming Iconosphere of the ‘Recent Past’ – Two Cases of Postcommunist Nostalgia
Workshop 9/25: Giuseppe Sciortino
After the Storm: Normative and Analytic Perspectives on Multiculturalism
Workshop 10/2: Andreas Hess
Sociology Of Knowledge, Intellectual History, Conceptual History: A Discussion
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). I contend that while sociologists can learn about and benefit from the thoroughness and some of the seriousness that intellectual and conceptual history stands for, in return intellectual and conceptual history can learn about how to be more ‘liberal’ and maybe less dogmatic when it comes to studying intellectuals and their ideas
Required Reading
Workshop 10/9: Rui Gao
Revolutionary Trauma and Representation of the War: the Case of China in Mao’s Era
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 million1. 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.
Why is this the case? One of the goals of this chapter is to delve into this curious phenomenon and to seek explanations from a cultural sociological point of view. As scholars of cultural trauma powerfully demonstrated, even widely shared suffering and injustice of enormous scale are not collectively traumatic in themselves, I argue that the horrendous misery and mass destruction brought by the war was never able to be translated into a cultural trauma for the collectivity; not only has there not been a successful trauma process occurring, the significance of the war was largely diminished by the triumph of other cultural traumas that had been powerfully constructed.
Required Reading
Workshop 10/16: Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi
Round Up the Unusual Suspects: Some Thoughts About Future Directions of Collective Memory Studies
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). As far as this seminar is concerned, I would like to use this precious time that I have been given in order to discuss some of my recent thoughts about the field of collective memory and commemoration, and its potential future directions (both theoretically and empirically). What I really would like to do is to hear your input and feedback. From my experience with this group in the last month, I am confident that both you and I can gain much from the discussion that I hope will evolve.
Since none of these potential directions/ideas is ready in a reading format [even at a level of a draft], I’m not attaching anything to read specifically for this meeting. I will talk about these future directions [what I call "the unusual suspects"] for about 15-20 minutes. Then, the floor will be open for ideas, directions, comments, warnings, references, criticism, etc. So this week you are more than welcome to take a break from reading but not from thinking…
Thank you for your time, patience and ideas,
Vered
Suggested Readings:
- Vinitzky-Seroussi, Vered. Unpacking the Unspoken: Silence in Collective Memory and Forgetting
- Vinitzky-Seroussi, Vered. Yitzhak Rabin’s Assassination and the Dilemmas of Commemoration
Workshop 10/23: Bing Xu
The Hermeneutical Approach in the ‘Subjective Critique’
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.” I originally planned to translate the first paper from Chinese into English, but have felt exhausted in translating just a half of it. The presentation here is the first two sections of the paper. Thank you so much for your patience to read and comment on such a rough translation of an incomplete and immature paper.
Required Reading:
Workshop 10/30: David Inglis
The Cultural Organisation of the Undead:
Haitian Voodoo, Life-Death Liminality and the Social Uses of the Zombie
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?
This paper depicts and analyses just such a situation, depicting some of the fraught relations that can pertain between academia on the one hand and zombies on the other (Olsen, 1986).
Required Reading:
- Inglis, David. Putting the Undead to Work: Wade Davis, Haitian Voodoo, and the Social Uses of the Zombie
David Inglis is Professor of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen, UK. He is a graduate of the Universities of Cambridge and York. He is an Academician of the UK Academy of the Social Sciences. He has written in the areas of the history of social thought, the sociologies of culture, art and aesthetics, and the cultural sociology of globalization. His books include The Globalization of Food (Berg, 2009), Art and Aesthetics: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences (Routledge, 2009), Food and Society: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences, (Routledge, 2007), The Sociology of Art: Ways of Seeing (Palgrave, 2005), Nature: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences (Routledge, 2005), Culture and Everyday Life (Routledge. 2005) and Confronting Culture: Sociological Vistas (Polity, 2003). He has been on the editorial and advisory boards of a range of journals, most recently European Journal of Social Theory and the Journal of Sociology. He is founding editor of the journal Cultural Sociology, published by Sage.
Workshop 11/6: Anthony King
The Armed Forces in Transformation: Organisation and Culture
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. In the last decade, Europe’s armed forces have been ever more active nominally under NATO and, as a result, NATO itself has undergone a series of significant reformations in term of its command structure. In fact, NATO reform has been for the most part empty. The NATO designated headquarters have been ineffective. Rather, NATO has facilitated the appearance of condensation of military expertise and resourcing in national operational headquarters. The emergence of these headquarters has produced a new military geography in Europe. A new transnational military network has appeared consisting of nodes of military power interconnected ever more closely with equivalent nodes in other nations. Campaigns especially in Afghanistan have been prosecuted by these nodes of national power. As the armed forces have engaged in high intensity operations in Afghanistan, they have taken significant casualties in stark contrast to the Cold War. The act of commemoration has been a necessary and important social ritual again. Significantly, paralleling the organisational transformation of the armed forces, the act of commemoration has changed – indicating a profound transformation in the relationship between the armed forces and civil society and the public conception of the soldier. The paper on commoration explores this changes in the status of the military and its relationship to civil society. The point is that today’s professional soldier, working in condensed nodes of military expertise, is understood to be and indeed soldiers define themselves differently to their twentieth century predecessors.
Required Reading:
Supplemental Reading:
- King, Anthony. Europe’s Operational Network
Workshop 11/13: Christine Slaughter
Gendering Political Legitimacy: The Case of Nancy Pelosi
Required Reading:
- Slaugher, Christine. Gendering Political Legitimacy: The Case of Nancy Pelosi
Workshop 11/20: Christopher Bail
Making Terrorists Racists: The Culture of Secrecy in Britain’s Domestic Counter-Terrorism Policy, 2001-2008
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. Secrecy allows elites to avoid public scrutiny, but also enables them to exert influence over each other through “leaks” or disclosure. The theoretical framework is used to explain the evolution of frames about “homegrown” terrorism deployed by British policy elites between 2001 and 2008. Archival analysis is used to identify shifts in the public framing strategies of the Labour administration, which initially avoided targeting Muslims but eventually announced a “battle of ideas” about Islam in which terrorists were labeled “racists” conducting “anti-Islamic activity.” Declassified memoranda, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic observation are used to study secret debates between elites about the root causes of home-grown terrorism. The results indicate leaks force elites to articulate frames that resolve contradictions between public and private discourse. In so doing, elites produce frames that are publicly coherent, but privately understood as haphazard compromises. This process increases the need for secrecy and constrains discursive opportunity over time.
Required Reading:
- Bail, Christopher. Making Terrorists Racists: The Culture of Secrecy in Britain’s Domestic Counter-Terrorism Policy, 2001-2008
Supplemental Reading:
- Bail, Christopher. The Configuration of Symbolic Boundaries against Immigrants in Europe