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Network Bios
Directory of Network Participants and Our Interests
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Bethany Bryson, brysonbp at jmu dot edu
James Madison University
Friday, Sep 20, 2002 (16:20)
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My current interest in symbolic boundaries centers on the way people in the United
States conceptualize their political landscape. Although the role of symbolic boundaries
in the formation of nations and social structure is firmly established, the
literature that informs the study of political opinions is heavily rooted in a psychological
view of political ideology. My current project is to re-analyze public opinion data from the
perspective of ideology as (bounded) political identity rather than as psycho-political
"orientation."
Mark Harris, mjh@uclink4.berkeley.edu
University of California, Berkeley - Jurisprudence and Social Policy
Friday, Nov 15, 2002 (12:47)
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I'm working on a dissertation about sex at work. Using in-depth interviews I investigate the ways in
which employees experience sexual desire in the workplace. The dissertation¼s stock-in-trade are the
experiences, thoughts, feelings, and talk which my interviewees relate about their everyday lives in
offices in the San Francisco Bay Area. The project will speak to the sociology of emotions and the
study of legal consciousness by paying attention to the socially situated rules and norms that govern
feelings and expressions of desire. I hope to illustrate a complicated interplay between "private" and
"public" lives.
John Ryan, johnryan@vt.edu
Virginia Tech
Tuesday, Nov 19, 2002 (12:24)
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I am interested in the role that cultural choice plays in creating and sustaining friendship networks, and in the
ways that friendship networks influence cultural choice. Recently Jim Witte (Clemson University) and I completed
a study examining measures of sociability and musical taste using data from the international Internet survey,
Survey 2000. We hope to follow this up with data from Survey 2001. I have also recently published a piece with
Richard Peterson (Vanderbilt) on the role of the guitar in identity construction for baby boomers, "The Guitar
as Artifact and Icon: Identity Formation in the Babyboom Generation" Pp 89-116 in Andy Bennett and Kevin Dawe
Eds. Guitar Cultures, Berg).
Charles Tilly, ct135@columbia.edu* (1929-2008)
Columbia University
Friday, Jan 3, 2003 (09:34)
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Charles Tilly teaches social sciences at Columbia University. His most recent books are Stories, Identities,
and Political Change (Rowman & Littlefield 2002), The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge University
Press 2003), and Contention and Democracy in Europe (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). A paper of
his paper titled "Social Boundary Mechanisms" will appear in a symposium on social mechanisms in Philosophy of
the Social Sciences, probably in 2004, and is available in electronic form by request directly to him:
ct135@columbia.edu*.
*[I've chosen to leave this email address in the text so that updating links doesn't erase this evidence of the fact that Tilly was one of our discipline's most accessible leaders.]
Maria Kefalas, mkefalas@sju.edu
Saint Joseph's University, Sociology
Wednesday, Jan 29, 2003 (13:59)
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Maria Kefalas is Assistant Professor of Sociology at St. JosephÌs University, Philadelphia, PA. Her new b
book, _Working-Class Heroes: Protecting Home, Community, and Nation in a Chicago Neighborhood_(2003) examines the
significance of place on the level of home, community, and nation in a working- and lower-middle -class white
Chicago neighborhood. She is currently collaborating with Kathy Edin on a new book about the meaning of motherhood
and marriage among low-income single women.
Paul Lichterman,
Friday, Jan 31, 2003 (23:24)
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I write about political, civic, and religious culture. I am completing *Elusive Togetherness* (forthcoming,
Princeton University Press), a book on religious community service groups responding to welfare reform.
Entering the debates about civic engagement and social capital, the book develops a novel argument about how
civic groups create, or refuse to create, broad social ties in a diverse, unequal society. My first book,
*The Search for Political Community* (Cambridge U Press, 1996) examined different wings of the grassroots
environmental movement. Counter to common thinking, the book showed that the prevalent individualism in
American culture can empower and not simply weaken political commitments.
Symbolic boundaries matter in my work in several ways. Among others: In a lot of my writing I have been
concerned with how civic and political groups construct "social maps" of their place in the larger world.
These maps powerfully enable and constrain a group's action. These maps are central to groups' understandings
of who they are. Groups draw these maps in very customary ways: Conjuring up the "wrong" map violates strong
group customs.
Peggy Levitt,
Sunday, Feb 2, 2003 (10:42)
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Peggy Levitt is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College and a Research Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University. She is the author of The Transnational Villagers (University of California Press, 2001) and co-editor with Mary Waters of The Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the Second Generation (Russell Sage Publications, 2002).
John Schmalzbauer, jschmalz@holycross.edu
College of the Holy Cross--Sociology/Anthropology Department
Sunday, Feb 2, 2003 (16:39)
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John Schmalzbauer's research focuses on how journalists and academics negotiate the boundaries between public and private, sacred and secular, and professional and religious worlds. These themes are explored in his
People of Faith: Religious Conviction in American Journalism and
Higher Education (Cornell University Press, 2003). He is assistant professor
of sociology and Edward Bennett Williams fellow at the College of the Holy
Cross.
Roger Friedland, roger.friedland@verizon.net
Departments of Religious Studies and Sociology, UCSB
Thursday, Feb 6, 2003 (18:09)
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I am current working on two projects, the first a study of religious nationalism as a case of institutional politics, and the second, a historical analysis of the relationship between Gurdjieffian mysticism and organic architecture in the organization and production of the Taliesin Fellowship, founded by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1932.
Mabel Berezin,
Cornell
Thursday, Feb 6, 2003 (22:58)
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Self description: I am a political and cultural sociologist whose work frequently crosses disciplinary boundariesÛmost frequently history and political science as well as sociology. My early work was on how European fascism as political ideology and practice attempted to transgress the boundaries between public and private; form and content. Recent work focuses on the relation between physical space, territory, and internal and external boundary making identity, the rational and the emotional. (cf. Berezin, ÏSecure States: Towards a Political Sociology of EmotionÓ in Barbalet, ed. Emotions and Sociology, Blackwell, 2002.
Elizabeth A. Armstrong,
Indian University, Bloomington
Thursday, Feb 6, 2003 (23:06)
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Elizabeth A. Armstrong, an Assistant Professor at IU since 2000, received her Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley. Her interests in cultural sociology, social movements, institutional theory, and sexuality are reflected in her book Forging Gay Identities: Organizing Sexuality in San Francisco, 1950-1994, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2002. The book details how, in the early seventies, activists were able to transform an ephemeral mass movement into a large-scale identity-building project. Armstrong is currently completing a paper with Martin Weinberg on how undergraduates interpret sexually-themed photographs. She is starting a project examining how culture guides sexual action in the lives of American college students.
Christena Nippert-Eng, nippert@iit.edu
Illinois Institute of Technology, Department of Social Sciences
Monday, Feb 10, 2003 (11:21)
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I'm finishing up a project now called "Islands of Privacy" on the boundary between what is private and what is public. It's funded by an external, basic R&D grant from Intel Corporation's AIM program -- their first non-engineering, non-science project to be funded. This is my first big project on boundary theory and construction since "Home and Work." The original data consists of formal, long interviews with mostly fairly well-educated individuals living here in Chicago and observation work in various public spaces in the city, too. There's a small piece of it that focuses on e-privacy, but I've cast my net very wide in my background research, looking at everything from architecture and design to medical concerns and normal everyday life stuff at home and the workplace -- and in-between. Great fun, indeed!
Bill Lockhart, William_Lockhart@baylor.edu
Baylor University/ Sociology and Anthropology
Monday, Feb 10, 2003 (11:43)
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I am beginning to apply the ideas of symbolic boundaries to my research that broadly explores the intersections of social stratification and religion. Specifically I have been investigating faith-based and secular poverty-to-work programs. I understand these programs as seeking to symbolically (at least)transform low-income people from being "welfare moms" and "dead-beat dads" to "potentially great employees" and "productive citizens." Barriers of class, race, gender and sometimes religion need to be negotiated in these programs.
I hope to join in with the "on-line conference" when I can this week.
George Gavrilis, gg96@columbia.edu
Political Science, Columbia University
Monday, Feb 10, 2003 (12:13)
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I am currently writing up a dissertation on the management of inter-state boundaries.
The project argues that international relations scholarship tends to see borders as
indicators of sovereignty and territoriality rather than as sites of
institutional creation. The theory chapter establishes a causal argument
that border authorities of two contiguous states will tend toward
cooperation if they have the opportunity to interact. Over time a
boundary that is locally and jointly managed by border guards of both
sides will be more cooperative, escalation-resistant and less costly to
operate than a unilaterally administered boundary. Yet states often do
not recognize such boundary regimes as efficient solutions to managing
relations in anarchy.
Penny Edgell, edgell@umn.edu
University of Minnesota/Sociology
Monday, Feb 10, 2003 (12:40)
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My interest in symbolic boundaries stems from my work on how religious communities make moral distinctions, and how those distinctions lead to social inclusion and exclusion, for example along lines of gender and race. My current work is on how religious communities construct "the good family" through rhetoric and routine institutional practices, and how the impact of these models of the good family have on members of religious communities and on who chooses to participate.
Albert J. Bergesen, albert@email.arizona. edu
University of Arizona/Sociology
Monday, Feb 10, 2003 (14:21)
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I am presently developing "Gramscian Inversion Theory", which, as you might imagine, turns Gramsci on his head: it isn't specific sub-national interests/identities that are masked by totalizing ideas/imagery/culture of a hegemonic class, but collective/national interests that are masked by the present postmodern reification of sub-collective interests/identities. This is placed in a globological context, where the cultural studies (Britain) and postmodern/poststructuralist (France) theories, pushing the traditional Gramscian model, are, in fact, engaged in a masking enterprise themselves (a Granscian Inversion) emphasizing the particular at the expense of the hegemon's universalism. If the hegemon employs Gramscian Theory, the lesser great powers employ Gramscian Inversion Theory. Both are geopolitical strategies on the global cultural plane; neither truth; both masking enterprises, no matter what they maintain. Both are globological cultural tools in the geopolitical struggle. It is not an accident, therefore, that Gramscian Inversion Theory (postmodernism, poststructuralism/cultural studies/multiculturalism) begins at the exact moment American economic hegemony begins to decline. To subvert the hegemon's claim to represent all, the lesser great powers (Brt., Fr., Germ.--hermeneutics) advance an alternative masking enterprise -- only the partial exists. Its all global politics and must be seen as such.
Neil McLaughlin, nmclaugh@mcmaster.ca
Sociology, McMaster University
Monday, Feb 10, 2003 (14:59)
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My research interests are in the sociology of intellectuals, sociological theory and research into the social origins of innovation. My present focus in the sociology of intellectuals concerns developing an empirically grounded theory of the "public intellectual" - a task that requires looking at the ways boundaries are enforced between academic and popular writings. I am also engaged in a Canadian government funded interdisciplinary project on globalization based primarily at McMaster University and University of Toronto. My part of the project concerns the relationship between globalization and public intellectual life, a topic that also involved issues of the boundaries that constitute intellectual communities. In terms of sociological theory, I am presently writing on Goffman with Robert Alford. And my interest in the sociology of intellectual innovation has lead me to Michael Farrell's provocative new book "Collaborative Circles" which deals with the small group dynamics that often create new forms of art, thought, literature or other cultural products. My own interest in studying Marxism, critical theory and psychoanalysis has led me to see these highly creative but often dogmatic forms of social thought as being created by intense circles of intellectuals who create boundaries around what is and what is not Marxism, critical theory or psychoanalyis... ..Thus my interest in this discussion.
Alford Young, Jr., ayoun@umich.edu
Department of Sociology, University of Michigan
Monday, Feb 10, 2003 (15:19)
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As far as the sociology of boundaries is concerned, my work consists of a study of how African American scholars who study and conduct research on the African American experience think about the social utility of their scholarship. I am interested in how they conceive of audiences for their work, and whether they maintain any distinctions between actual and perceived audiences. Focusing on this question allows me to explore how individuals atruggle with notions of social relevance and connection to constituencies ourtside of the academy while striving for security or visibility within the academy. I am looking at transcripts from nearly seventy open-ended interviews with scholars from research universities and liberal arts colleges that maintain a research expectation in order to ascertain how, when, and why these individuals consider boundary crossing in terms of reaching audiences outside of the academy as well as when they regard boundary maintenance as useful, legitimate, or appropriate for the pursuit of scholarly objectives.
Alison Grace Cliath, acliath@wsu.edu
Washington State University Department of Sociology
Monday, Feb 10, 2003 (16:30)
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My dissertation research examines how actors negotiate the symbolic boundaries of what are state, local civil society, global civil society and ìmarketî realms of collaborative projects of environmental protection in Cuba and Costa Rica. While the environmental protection of parks and biosphere reserves remains a state responsibility and the international model of environmentalization mandates that civil society groups manage these local resources, neither the government nor the local people have the resources to follow through on these visions of environmental action. Enter market actors (who have aims of tourism and bioprospecting for pharmaceuticals) and INGOs, who (of course) not only provide the resources, but also bring their own cultural logics to these collaborative projects of environmental protection. Hence, my interest in symbolic boundaries is centered around the fascinating and various ways that actors reconcile and negotiate contradictory institutional/cultural logics, distribute power in ways that maintain collaboration and positive ecological outcomes (or not), and foster new institutional identities, routines and capacities of state-market-civil society collaborations.
Dustin Kidd, dkidd@virginia.edu
University of Virginia/Sociology
Monday, Feb 10, 2003 (17:53)
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I am interested in culture, political sociology, and cultural policy. My dissertation research analyzes the National Endowment for the Arts, and the controversies surrounding them, from a new institutional perspective. I am analyzing primary source documents from the several organizations that got involved in the NEA controversies of the late 80s/early 90s to map the institutional cultures of these organizations. I am primarily interested in identifying their assumptions about art, artistic authority, and the issues at stake in public funding for the arts, in order to then identify how these institutional cultures shaped their activity in the controversy. I also analyze how institutional cultures change during the course of the controversy.
Sherrill Stroschein, strosche@ohio.edu
Political Science, Ohio University
Tuesday, Feb 11, 2003 (10:41)
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I research ethnic identity and political contention in multi-ethnic cities in East Central Europe -- in local settings where ethnic boundaries have rarely produced violent conflict. I am particularly interested in linguistic boundaries and symbolic boundary markers, such as holidays or monuments endorsed by one group but alien to another. These serve as immediate mobilizers for ethnic parties and are fundamental to political contention. Current countries: Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Serbia, and Hungary.
Marvin Prosono, map881f@smsu.edu
Southwest Missouri State University/Sociology and Anthropology
Tuesday, Feb 11, 2003 (12:08)
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Although my dissertation was in the professionalization of forensic psychiatry in the sociology department at UCSF (medical sociology), an interest in the sociology of the Holocaust led me to publish a paper entitled "Symbolic Territoriality and the Holocaust: The Controversy over the Carmelite Convent at Auschwitz" (Perspectives on Social Problems, JAI, Vol. 5, 1994). This paper takes a symbolic interactionist/pragmatist perspective on this controversy. It is wonderful to see so many others involved in a conversation on symbolic mapping, boundaries, etc. This is an area rich with possibilities and I hope to continue using these themes in my explorations of issues in medicine and law.
Barrie Thorne, bthorne@socrates.berkeley.edu
University of California, Berkeley - Sociology and Women's Studies
Tuesday, Feb 11, 2003 (19:06)
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My 1993 book, Gender Play, focused on gender relations among kids in elementary
schools. Drawing on Frederick Barth's book on ethnic boundaries, I used the
concept of "borderwork" to conceptualize interactions between girls and boys
(e.g., "girls chase the boys", "cooties,' boys invading girls' play) that marked
group gender boundaries and sustaind a sense of girls and boys as "opposite
sides" (Other forms of mixed-gender interaction lessened the salience of
gender.) I am now writing an ethnography about the daily lives of chldren and
families in a mixed-income, ethnically diverse area of Oakland, which is framed
by an anaysis of changing political economy of urban U.S. childhoods (including
immigration and widening class divides). I'm especially interested in "contact
zones" where kids and caregivers from different class, immigration, and cultural
backgrounds come into regular contact. How do varied participants in these
encounters mark, rework, and/or override varous lines of difference and
inequality? How are boundaries constituted and reconfigured, partly through the
action
Changdeog, Changdeog Huh
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
Friday, Feb 14, 2003 (12:16)
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I am now working on my dissertation, culture and social movements. Since I stepped into the palace of Sociology in 1984, I have been interested in sociological knowledge for my real life. I am still trying to narrow it down for the disparity or distance between what I know and who I am.
vivian martin, martinv@mail.ccsu.edu
Central Connecticut State University, asst. prof. Jornalism/English,
Friday, Feb 14, 2003 (17:31)
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I am doing a grounded theory dissertation on how people interact with news in everyday life.Through a mix of in-depth interviews with letter-writers to a newspaper and other people, participant observation with a book club, Internet discussion group and much textual analysis, a theory of interaction is emerging and symbolic boundaries are an important conceptual framework for integrating the data. As a journalism prof and longtime journalist I used to think getting the news was just a matter of people picking up the paper, but getting-the-news-from-the-news requires the convergence of many interpersonal, social and cultural processes.
Maxine Craig, mcraig@csuhayward.edu
California State University, Hayward/Sociology Department
Wednesday, Feb 19, 2003 (17:19)
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My book Ain't I a Beauty Queen: Black Women, Beauty and the Politics of Race (Oxford University Press, 2002) looked at the way that black women's bodies became part of a symbolic repertoire that defined and drew symbolic boundaries around racial identity. I am currently writing about the increasing salience and possible racialization of provincial identity in Papua New Guinea. The work is an exploration of the kinds of contexts in which relatively meaningless boundaries become important enough to fight about. The project is based upon over two years of fieldwork and interviews conducted in Papua New Guinea.
Tony Carnes, contents.sem@columbia.edu
Columbia University & Research Institute for New Americans
Saturday, Mar 15, 2003 (10:27)
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For the last couple of years my seminar on the theory and methods of sociology has been working on applying and developing the idea of borders and boundaries. Next September, NYU Press will publish Fenggang Yang and my book: Asian American Religions: Borders and Boundaries.
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