Sociology Department News
LA Times Op-Ed by 2019 UCD Sociology graduate Rocio Perez
My immigrant parents lost their jobs; the CARE Act won't help
Konrad Franco, Caitlin Patler, and Keramet Reiters Have a New Paper
"Punishing Status and the Punishment Status Quo: Solitary Confinement in U.S. Immigration Detention Facilities, 2013-2017" featured by the International Consortium for Investigative Journalists.
Ming-Cheng Lo selected for inaugural cohort of new U.S.-Taiwan Next Generation Working Group at the Institute of East Asian Studies at UC Berkeley
Eli Alston-Stepnitz and Angelita Repetto named Mellon Public Scholars
Eli Alston-Stepnitz and Angelita Repetto have been selected to join the prestigious 2020 cohort of Mellon Public Scholars. This competitive program introduces graduate students to the intellectual and practical aspects of addressing and collaborating with members of a public through their scholarship. Participants take part in an interdisciplinary spring seminar and receive a $7,500 fellowship over the summer as they carry out a project in collaboration with their community partners and a faculty member. Congratulations, Eli and Angelita!
Article by Charlotte Glennie published on City and Community
How does culture influence the political and economic processes shaping cities? Socially rich but unprofitable land uses, such as community gardens, create a trade-off between maintaining local character and increasing exchange value. As part of the Sociology PhD program, I conducted independent research to better understand how less profitable land uses such as community gardens can prevail in development conflicts. I examined documents and interviewed advocates for Seattle’s P-Patch program, which has secured virtual permanence for its publicly owned garden sites. My historical analysis shows that the P-Patch advocates, endowed with significant cultural capital, appealed to notions of Seattle’s place character and leveraged the city’s legal-policy infrastructure to institutionalize community gardens within Seattle’s urban planning framework. The gardens serve a wide constituency, including many low-income and minority residents, but as neighborhood amenities signifying urban sustainability, they also contribute to gentrification. My findings suggest that residents can leverage culture and local character to protect use value, but equity is far from inherent to this process and therefore requires deliberate consideration.
Rafi Grosglik co-authors article on food, identity, therapeutic culture, and capitalism
Although there is burgeoning research on the impact of therapeutic culture in the construction of the individual Self, the ways in which emotional discourse and therapeutic style shape the collective Self have been overlooked. Focusing on the popular reality-television cooking show MasterChef Israel, this article explores the emergence of gastro-emotivism – an interlacing of food with emotions and therapy and a materialization of emotions in the form of food. In MasterChef Israel, gastro-emotivism is used to articulate emotional-therapeutic selves as well as collective belongings and social categories. While recent literature understood the appearance of therapeutic culture in popular media as geared to reshape the individual neoliberal Self, we suggest that gastro-emotivism indicates the expansion of the emotional therapeutic framework in the depiction and construction of collective identities and identifications. We elaborate on the global phenomena of gastro-emotivism and explain its particular Israeli appearance. Emerging from this account is the proliferation of emotional-therapeutic discourse in the Israeli public sphere and its predominance in the ways in which Israelis ‘cook, taste and feel’ their collective affiliations.
Ming-Cheng Lo co-authors article published in Theory and Society
Typhoon Morakot, the deadliest typhoon in recorded history to strike Taiwan, caused catastrophic destruction in the summer of 2009. Amidst the wreckage of their villages, survivors faced the challenge of consolidating communal visions for reconstruction. The grassroots voices of Morakot’s survivors, however, were stifled by heavy-handed state agendas. Some villages succeeded in resisting top-down agendas, eventually consolidating their own visions, but most did not. How can we explain these differences? Our article addresses this question through a three-village comparison.
Professor Stephanie Mudge wins two major American Sociological Association awards and receives an honorable mention for another
Professor Mudge's book, Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press 2018) won the American Sociological Association's (ASA) Political Sociology section book award, the Barrington-Moore Book Award from the ASA Historical-Comparative section, and an honorable mention for the Viviana Zelizer Award for the ASA, Economic Sociology section book award.
Caitlin Patler Wins Pacific Sociological Association Award
UC Davis Sociology Assistant Professor Caitlin Patler wins Sociological Perspectives Best Article Award.
