October 14, 2009
Unsure Militants: Workers’ Politics in Two Central Indian Towns, 1977-2006
Manjusha Nair, Rutgers University

Nair compares two sites of a single labor movement in Chhattisgarh—a state in central India—to see how workers’ identities and politics evolve differently. In contrast to approaches that treat class, citizenship and community as empirically disjunct fields of practice, her material shows that communities of citizens do use working class identities to engage in productive politics with state and capital. Nair’s comparison of the two sites throws light on the social and temporal situatedness of workers’ identities and practices. The first site, Dalli-Rajhara, exemplifies a state-centered context in the political economy of India, where native manual mine workers organized against their employer in the state-owned iron-ore mines of Chhattisgarh region in 1977. The second, Bhilai, is more a product of a shift from a state-centered to a neo-liberal paradigm, where native contract workers organized against both the state (playing less of an ownership role) and private capital, from 1989. Based on archival and ethnographic research, Nair argues that workers at the two sites have evolved two different working class identities and cultures, though both are predicated on the existence of a powerful nation-state protecting citizen-workers.

Manjusha Nair is a PhD Candidate in the Sociology Program at Rutgers University. Her dissertation research focuses on comparative and ethnographic analyses of the political practices of the unequal citizens, specifically, their interactions with the state. She has completed her Masters in Sociology from Rutgers (2005) and Master of Philosophy in Economics (1999) from Jawaharlal Nehru University in India. Her research interests fall within Political Sociology, Comparative and Historical Sociology, Political Economy, and South Asia. She has published with the Journal of Historical Sociology, World Society Foundation and Economic and Political Weekly. For her dissertation fieldwork, she has won fellowships from the Social Science Research Council (International Dissertation Research Fellowship Program) and the American Institute of Indian Studies (Junior Research Fellowship).

October 21, 2009
Why Terror?
Jeff Goodwin, New York University

Drawing on a range of case studies, this talk explores the reasons why states and political movements sometimes try to kill indiscriminately certain civilians or noncombatants. It also considers the conditions that seem to inhibit the use of such terror. It challenges conventional views of terrorism as a “weapon of the weak” or a product of ideological zealotry.

Jeff Goodwin is Professor of Sociology at New York University. He earned his baccalaureate and doctorate at Harvard University and has taught at NYU since 1991. His research and writings focus on social movements, revolutions, and, terrorism. His book No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945-1991, won the Outstanding Book Prize of the Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section of the American Sociological Association. His American Sociological Review article, “The Libidinal Constitution of a High-Risk Social Movement,” won the Barrington Moore Prize from the Comparative-Historical Sociology section of the ASA. He is coeditor of Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements; Rethinking Social Movements: Structure, Culture, and Emotion; and The Contexts Reader. He is a former coeditor, with James Jasper, of Contexts, the ASA’s magazine for general readers. He is currently finishing a collection of essays, titled How to Explain a Social Movement, as well as a monograph, titled Why Terror?, on why states and political movements sometimes employ and sometimes reject the strategy of terrorism.

October 28, 2009
Needle in a Haystack: Some Working Hypotheses about the Cultural Production of the Natural World in the Urban Environment
David Grazian, University of Pennsylvania

David Grazian is Associate Professor and Undergraduate Chair of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Prof. Grazian received his B.A. from Rutgers University in 1994, and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2000. He teaches courses on popular culture, mass media and the arts; cities and urban sociology; social interaction and public behavior; and ethnographic methods. In his research he employs a variety of ethnographic and other qualitative methods to study the production and consumption of commercial entertainment in the urban milieu. He is the author of two books: Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs (Univ. Chicago Press, 2003), and On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife (Univ. Chicago Press, 2008). He is currently writing a textbook on the sociology of popular culture.

November 4, 2009
Developments and Challenges in Health Reform
David Mechanic, Rutgers University

David Mechanic is the René Dubos University Professor of Behavioral Sciences and Founder and Director of the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research at Rutgers. He is the author of more than 400 publications, including The Truth About Health Care: Why Reform is Not Working in America; Inescapable Decisions: The Imperatives of Health Reform and Mental Health and Social Policy: Beyond Managed Care (fifth edition). A member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine, Dr. Mechanic has received numerous awards, including the Distinguished Career Award for the Practice of Sociology and the Lifetime Contributions Award in Mental Health from the American Sociological Association, the Rema Lapouse Award and the First Carl Taube Award for Distinguished Contributions to Mental Health Services Research from the American Public Health Association, and the Baxter Health Services Research Prize. Dr. Mechanic received his doctorate in sociology from Stanford University.

November 11, 2009
Blind to Sameness: The Socio-Optical Construction of Male and Female Bodies
Asia Friedman, Rutgers University

Friedman’s research draws on interviews with 27 blind people and 41 transgender people to explore the visual foundations of the social construction of reality. Specifically, she analyzes how perception contributes to the social construction of male and female bodies. She chose to interview blind people because they literally cannot see sex, and as such their narratives provide access to a perceptual experience of sexed bodies that is totally different in sensory content from the typical sighted experience. By highlighting their alternate perceptual reality of bodies, she demonstrates that the prevailing understanding of sex is specifically sex seen as opposed to sex sensed more broadly. She interviewed transgender people as "experts" on sex attribution who, because they view the human body in light of the possibility of transitioning between sexes, are deeply aware of the underlying similarities between male and female bodies as well as their most recalcitrant differences. As a result, they offer an account of sexed bodies that is similar in its sensory content to the dominant perceptual experience (in that it is visual), but with a heightened awareness of sex cues that non-transgender people take for granted, and a unique point of view that brings some of the normally unseen similarities between male and female bodies into the foreground. While sex attribution is her case, Friedman also uses her data to advance a more general theory of how – through what specific cognitive processes – visual perception is shaped by social categories and expectations.

Asia Friedman is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University working in the areas of culture, gender, cognition, and the body. An overview of the central theoretical argument of her dissertation is forthcoming in Cultural Sociology.

November 18, 2009
From a Moment of Silence to Silencing the Moment
Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University and Dept. of Sociology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Collective memory quite naturally brings to mind notions of mnemonic speech and representation. In this talk, however, I propose that collective silences be thought of as a rich and promising arena through which to understand how groups deal with their collective pasts. In so doing, I explore two types of silence: overt silence and covert silence and suggest that each may be used to enhance either memory or forgetting. I illustrate my conceptual scheme using data on the commemoration of the slain Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin.

Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi is an associate Professor at the department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Vinitzky-Seroussi is the author of two books on collective memory: After Pomp and Circumstance: High School Reunion as an Autobiographical Occasion (Chicago 1998) and Yitzhak Rabin's Assassination and the Dilemmas of Commemoration (State University of New York Press, 2009). She is currently editing The Collective Memory Reader together with Jeffrey Olick and Daniel Levy (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). She has also published numerous papers, review essays and book chapters in the field as well as on other issues (e.g., on announcing death). She is currently a visiting fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University.