Give Theory A Chance

In this episode Elizaveta Lepikhova, a second year MA student, teaching assistant, and supplemental instructor of sociology at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, discusses the work of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann.  Elizaveta discusses their contributions to the sociology of everyday life, introduces her schema of explaining their ideas (see here), and reflects on first reading the work in Russian. She also talks about Berger and Luckmann’s influence on her own research on social time.

In this episode we are joined by Jonathan Wynn, Associate Professor and Department Chair of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of Music/City: American Festivals and Placemaking in Austin, Nashville, and Amherst. Jon introduces us to Erving Goffman, reflects on Goffman’s intellectual location and influence within the discipline, and discusses how his own work has built on Goffman’s call for a sociology of occasions.

*I also recommend checking out Jon’s frequent posts on the Everyday Sociology blog.

In this episode, we are joined by Fabio Rojas, professor of sociology at Indiana University Bloomington and author of Theory for the Working Sociologist (2017). Fabio introduces his approach to teaching sociological theory, discusses the four theoretical moves made within the discipline, and argues against the common practice of having students engage in lengthy readings of original texts and the disciplinary tendency to turn our favorite theorists into superheroes.

In this episode we are joined by Dr Alex Channon, Senior Lecturer in the School of Sport and Service Management at the University of Brighton. Alex introduces us to Stephen Lyng and his theorization of edgework. Alex illustrates the value of the concept through discussing his research on sport, violence, and interactions in the martial arts gym and how the concept helped inspire his Love Fighting Hate Violence project with Dr. Christopher Matthews.

In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Jocelyn Viterna, Professor of Sociology and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Harvard University. Jocelyn introduces her approach to teaching sociological theory in a way that is honest about our intellectual roots and engages with the centrality of social evolutionary thought and racist ideology in early disciplinary writings. Jocelyn discusses the work of Herbert Spencer and also guides us through a 1909 book review from Frank Wilson Blackmar, the 9th President of the American Sociological Society (Association).

In this episode we are joined by Dr Anna Goulding, Senior Research Associate at Newcastle University, UK, and a scholar of art, identity, aging, and community. Anna introduces us to Elinor Ostrom, her theorization of co-production, and potential of the term to be weakened through popularization and misapplication. Anna illustrates the methodological value and challenges of co-production through reflecting on her own efforts at putting the theory into practice.

In this episode, Dr. Shai Dromi, a lecturer of Sociology at Harvard University and author of Above the Fray: The Red Cross and the Making of the Humanitarian NGO Sector (2020), joins us to read from Luc Boltanski’s co-authored article ‘The Sociology of Critical Capacity‘ (1999).

Shai introduces us to Boltanski and Thévenot’s analysis of “critical” moments, the process that follows, and the use of the six worlds of justification.

Follow along HERE.

-Kyle-

In this episode we are joined by Dr. Shai Dromi, a lecturer of Sociology at Harvard University and author of the recently published Above the Fray: The Red Cross and the Making of the Humanitarian NGO Sector (2020). In our conversation, Shai introduces us to the work of Luc Boltanski and discusses how he found inspiration in Boltanski’s theorizing of communication and morality. Shai also helps us better understand the value of Boltanski’s ideas through introducing his co-authored research on how advertisers make sense of the moral worth of their jobs and his in-progress co-authored book on how morality emerged as a  point of contention or has been obscured in our key disciplinary debates.

In this episode we are joined by Jeff Guhin, an assistant professor of sociology at UCLA, and author of the recently published Agents of God: Boundaries and Authority in Muslim and Christian Schools. Jeff discusses the inspiration he finds in the works of Charles Taylor, reflects on the value and challenges of reading philosophy as a sociologist, the importance of having friends, and introduces us to social imaginaries and “subtraction stories.”

In this episode, Dr. Tina Sikka, a Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Newcastle University and author of Climate Technology, Gender, and Justice,  joins us to read from Helen Longino‘s ‘Can There Be A Feminist Science’ (1987).

Tina introduces us to Longino’s central question about what makes a science feminist, guides us through Longino’s rejection of answering the question through focus on topic or object, helps us understand the focus on process, and highlights Longino’s attention to structural constraints.

Follow along HERE.

-Kyle-

In this episode we are joined by Neil Gong. Neil is an assistant professor of sociology at UC San Diego, a member of the Michigan Society of Fellows, and winner of the 2020 American Sociological Association’s Junior Theorist of the Year award. In our conversation, Neil introduces the work of Norbert Elias, reflects on both the challenges and inspirations of his historical writing and grand theory, and discusses how the concept of the ‘threshold of repugnance’ provided guidance in Neil’s ethnography of ‘no-rules’ combat clubs.

In this episode we are joined by Anas Karzai, lecturer in the Department of Sociology and coordinator of the criminology program at Laurentian University.  Anas joins us to speak about the subject of his book Nietzsche and Sociology: Prophet of Affirmation. We discuss why Friedrich Nietzsche has not received the attention he deserves within sociology, how his writings offer a valuable critique of the dialectic and the narrative of progress, and his under-appreciated critique of racism.

In this episode, Dr. Shamus Khan joins us to read from Leviathan: Or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civil, the 1651 Thomas Hobbes classic work of social theory.

Shamus shares his advice on reading theory fast, helps us understand how Hobbes conceptualized social contract theory and the relationship between violence and equality, and models how to center the colonial roots of foundational texts.

Follow along HERE (Chapter 13, page 81)

-Kyle-

In this episode, we are joined by Shamus Khan, professor in and chair of the sociology department at Columbia University. Shamus discusses his approach to teaching the sociological canon, the importance of focusing on moments of racist and colonial discourse as central to, rather than in spite of, the core theories, and the value of directly linking the learning of methods and theory.

In this episode we are joined by Dr. Saida Grundy, Assistant Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies at Boston University and author of the forthcoming book Manhood Within the Margins: Promise, Peril and Paradox at the Historically Black College for Men. In our wide-ranging conversation, Saida discusses how the 1899 Du Bois classic, The  Philadelphia Negro, provided a model for studying race and a model for how to do sociological research, what it means to center Du Bois as a founder of sociology, and his relationship to black women scholars of the time. Saida also reflects on the value of Du Bois for her own work on black masculinity, reactive respectability politics, hierarchies from within the veil, and racialized rape culture.

Our guests today are Hannah McCann, a Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne and Whitney Monaghan, an Assistant Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies at Monash University. Hannah and Whitney are co-authors of the recently published textbook Queer Theory Now. In our wide-ranging conversation, we discuss the challenge of defining queer theory, the relationship between queer and feminist theory, and think through the importance of time.

In this episode, Dr. Angela Jones joins us to read from The Souls of Black Folk, the 1903 W.E.B Du Bois classic work of social theory.

This is the first of a new type of Give Theory a Chance podcast where contemporary social theorists introduce us to the specific passages that inspired them and help us make sense of the text. When possible, I will include a link (the link) to a pdf so the listener can follow along.

I hope this offers a useful aid for people first encountering these important ideas and hope it offers others the perfect chance to re-connect with favorite readings from the past.

-Kyle-

In this episode we are joined by Dr. Angela Jones, Associate Professor of Sociology at Farmingdale State College, State University of New York and author of the recently published book Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Work Industry. Angela discusses the importance of recognizing W.E.B. Du Bois as a founder of the discipline, his under-appreciated methodological contributions, and the clarity of his prose. Angela also reflects on the value of Du Bois for her own work both as a scholar and as an activist.

In this episode we are joined by Dr. Rachel O’Neill, a Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications at The London School of Economics and Political Science. Rachel discusses the work of contemporary theorist Rosalind Gill.  Rachel introduces us to Gill’s writings on post-feminism and mediated intimacy. Rachel also demonstrates the value of the two concepts through discussion of her own research on the seduction community, which is the subject of her 2018 book, Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy.

In this episode we are joined by Dr. Madeleine Pape, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology and Science in Human Culture program at Northwestern University. Madeleine introduces us to the work of Anne Fausto-Sterling and discusses how Fausto-Sterling demands a move beyond a strictly binary model of sex and encourages a shift away from static understandings of being. Madeleine also reflects on how discover Fausto-Sterling’s work was particularly impactful due to her own background as an elite athlete who competed for Australia at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing and the 2009 World Championships in Track and Field in Berlin.

In this episode we are joined by Jaclyn Wypler, a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Jaclyn joins us to reflect on her shift from not being a fan of theory to being an organizer of the 2020 Junior Theorists Symposium. Jaclyn shares what her approach to theory and cookies have in common and uses her research on the experience of queer farmers in rural United States to demonstrate the value of a practice-oriented approach to engaging with the sociological canon.

In this episode we are joined by Ricarda Hammer, a PhD candidate in Sociology at Brown University and a Graduate Fellow at Brown’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. Her work has been published in Sociological Theory, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Political Power and Social Theory, and Teaching Sociology.

Ricarda discusses the powerful insight Stuart Hall provides on a wide-range of sociological areas of inquiry including culture, identity, race, and rethinking the relationship between the metropole and the colony. Ricarda also reflects on joys and transformative experience of engaging with Hall’s work.

In this episode we are joined once again by Seth Abrutyn, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Seth joins us to discuss what sociology can potentially add to the public conversation that surrounds COVID-19. In our conversation, Seth touches on the value of a number of theorists including Emile Durkheim, Erving Goffman, Jaak Panksepp.

In this episode, Amy Guptill, Professor of Sociology at The College at Brockport, State University of New York, discusses her recent discovery of Niklas Luhmann and systems theory. In particular, Amy reflects on how Luhmann avoids some of the negatives associated with his intellectual mentor Talcott Parsons and provides a powerful tool to better conceptualize food production and consumption.

*This is the final of three GTaC episodes hosted by Alysha Rios, undergraduate sociology major at SUNY Brockport. Thanks Alysha.

In this episode we are joined by Richard Pringle, Professor of Sport, Health and Physical Education at Monash University. Richard reflects on the challenge of transitioning from reading kinesiology to reading Michel Foucault, discusses how Foucault provided him with a lens to understand pain and gender on the rugby pitch, and offers advice on the importance of engaging with the original text when employing the ideas of a social theorist.

In this episode we are joined by Erin Metz McDonnell, Kellogg Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame and author of the recently published Patchwork Leviathan: Pockets of Bureaucratic Effectiveness in Developing States. Erin introduces us to the “budgetary unit”–a powerful, but under-utilized Weberian term–and discusses how she expands Weber’s theorization of bureaucracy through her fieldwork in Ghana. Erin also offers valuable reflection on what it means to be engaging with texts that are now over a century old in both her research and her teaching.

In addition, Erin was kind enough to provide interested listeners with links to some of the readings mentioned in our conversation:

From Weber himself:
http://anthropos-lab.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Weber-Science-as-a-Vocation.pdf
https://www.amazon.com/Economy-Society-Outline-Interpretive-Sociology/dp/0520035003
https://www.amazon.com/Protestant-Spirit-Capitalism-Routledge-Classics/dp/041525406X/

On Max, Marianne, and W.E.B.
https://www.amazon.com/Spirit-vs-Souls-Scholarship-Intellectual/dp/0268106010
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41949541?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095269519801100204
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/026327691008003014
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12108-018-9368-2

… in which Howard Becker reports on interviewing Marianne
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3483457?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

And from our guest:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0003122417705874
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/673295

Our guest today is Daniel Winchester, Associate Professor of Sociology at Purdue University. Dan tells us about his initial encounter with Pierre Bourdieu’s famously dense writings, his application of Bourdieu’s ideas in his Masters thesis on Islamic faith, and his more recent turn to the American Pragmatism to supplement his use of Bourdieu in studying the process of converting to Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

*Dan is the recent winner of the American Sociological Association’s Junior Theorist of the Year Award for his co-authored paper “Talking Your Self into It: How and When Accounts Shape Motivation for Action”

**Make sure to check out the accompanying video made by SUNY Brockport sociology major Simone Graham – https://youtu.be/1FXzNctRFbw

In this episode, Alysha Rios interviews Elliot Weininger, Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology at SUNY Brockport, about Pierre Bourdieu. Elliot reflects on how Bourdieu offered a bridge between his philosophical interests and his quantitative training and explains how his interest in central concepts like cultural capital led to a series of collaborations with Annette Lareau researching the education system.

Our guest for this episode is Pirkko Markula, Professor of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation at the University of Alberta. Pirkko takes on the challenge of discussing both Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze in a single podcast. Pirkko explains how reading them together offers insight into embodied practices and reveals more ethical possibilities. Something that Pirkko herself explores in both her research activities and fitness classes.

The guest for this episode is Anna Hickey-Moody, a Professor of Media and Communications at RMIT University and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. Anna is also the author of the recently published Deleuze and Masculinity. In our conversation, Anna discusses both the challenges and charms of Gilles Deleuze and how she has built on the concepts of affect and assemblages in her own research on youth education, art, and community.

“There is something about their writing style that I could be with. One is alone in a room with them for a long time. One is listening to what they are saying and speaking back to them…Also, I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to understand them.”

In this episode we are joined by Elise Paradis, Assistant Professor at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Toronto. Elise introduces us to the work of John Meyer and the value of neo institutional theory as an alternative to more functionalist or conflict-oriented perspectives. In particular, Elise demonstrates the importance of the concept of “decoupling” through her work on the gap between policy and practice in the operating room.

In this episode we are joined by Stefano Bloch, Assistant Professor in the School of Geography & Development at the University of Arizona and author of Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA’s Graffiti Subculture.  Stefano reflects on his initial encounters with the writings of Henri Lefebvre as an undergraduate literature major and discusses how Lefebvre’s ideas have served as a foundation to all of his scholarly research and teaching since. Stefano also provides useful advice for how we need to approach theory as ideas and tools to be applied rather than eternal truths.

“It is as if the pages came alive. Everything that I had thought was drowning in jargon and overly convoluted… all of sudden started to make sense to me because I was hanging each of those words on this view of the world that I had already held inside me, which was the perspective of the world and the built environment as a graffiti writer.

In this episode we are joined by Clifton Evers. Clifton is a lecturer in media and cultural studies at Newcastle University and founding member of The Shadow Places Network. Clifton discusses how reading Raewyn Connell forced him to reflect on his own lived experience with and performances of masculinity and sent him down a research path that both builds on and complicates many of her foundational concepts.

“Her theory is very productive and that is the best thing you can say about a theory.”

In this episode we are joined by Tristan Bridges, editor of the Journal of Men and Masculinities and Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Bridges joins us to reflect on the influence Raewyn Connell has had on his understandings of masculinity and power from his initial encounters with her writings to his more recent scholarship.
*This podcast is the first of three hosted by Alysha Rios, an undergraduate sociology major at SUNY Brockport, who makes podcast hosting look far easier than it is.

In this episode of Give Theory a Chance, we speak to Alex Manning, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Hamilton College. Alex explains how his work builds on and complicates Annette Lareau’s writings on class reproduction and parenting. In particular, Alex explains his own work on elite youth sport and a form of concerted cultivation employed by parents of color across the economic spectrum. We also discuss how Lareau provides a model of how do theory in a manner that is intellectually impressive and impressively accessible.

In this episode we speak to Stephen Cho Suh, an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women’s and Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado – Colorado Springs. Stephen explains how Edward Said’s writings on Orientalism shaped his research on the popularity of Korean American chefs in South Korea’s food and beverage industry. We also discuss how Said’s critique of knowledge production raises fundamental questions about who does research and what stories are told.

In this episode we are joined by Timothy Recuber, an assistant professor of sociology at Smith College and author of Consuming Catastrophe: Mass Culture in America’s Decade of Disaster. Recuber introduces us to the work Colin Campbell and discusses how he adapted Campbell’s concept of autonomous self-illusory hedonism for his research on media consumption of disasters. Recuber also reflects on the challenges of drawing on theories that transcend disciplinary boundaries.

In this episode we speak to Jaime Kucinskas, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Hamilton College and author of The Mindful Elite: Mobilizing from the Inside Out. Kucinskas explains how reading George Herbert Mead shifted her understanding of the self away from the individualistic model so popular in the United States towards seeing the self as a product of the social environment. We discuss the profound impact that realization had for Kucinskas, both as a scholar and as a person in the world.

In this episode we are joined by Seth Abrutyn, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Abrutyn joins us to speak about his initial encounters with the writings of Emile Durkheim and how his current research on suicide was both inspired by and offers important correctives to Durkheim’s famous work. Abrutyn also reflects on whether as a discipline we are guilty of deifying the classic theorists and whether the social theory syllabus is in need of a dramatic re-working.

In this episode we speak to Jeffrey Montez de Oca an Associate Professor of Sociology and the founding director of the Center for the Critical Study of Sport at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Montez de Oca shares tales from his circuitous path to Marxism and reflects on how he came to realize that Karl Marx provides the tools necessary to help us understand the alienation and inequalities brought about by capitalism.

In this episode we are joined by Douglas Hartmann, Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. We discuss how discovering C.L.R. James shaped Hartmann’s understandings of race and resistance. In particular, Hartmann reflects on how James memoir on cricket provides a valuable resource for understanding sports and politics.