Department of Sociology

Description

Description:

As the United States' scientific institutions face unprecedented challenges due to changes in federal government policy, the extent and durability of public support for science and scientists becomes a matter of some importance. This talk reviews a series of studies of the U.S. public's attitudes toward science that reveal surprisingly broad, but also somewhat fragile, support for scientists and for public policies that support them.

Bio:

Paul DiMaggio is A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, with a joint appointment in The Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. He has written widely on organizational analysis, sociology of culture, and social inequality. Among the several books he has written or edited are The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (with Walter Powell); Race, Ethnicity and Participation in the Arts (with Francie Ostrower); and The 21st-Century Firm: Changing Economic Organization in International Perspective.   He has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1984-85) and a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1990). He has also served on the Connecticut Commission on the Arts and on the board of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies.   His interests include the sociology of art and culture, social stratification, economic sociology, complex organizations, and the social implications of technology. He is Director of the Center for the Study of Social Organization, active in the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Center for Information Technology and Public Policy. He is involved in research on inequality of access to the new digital technologies, new approaches to identifying patterns in attitude data, and patterns of participation in the arts.

RECEPTION TO FOLLOW 

Description

Desription:

"There are many ways of conducting an analysis, but most studies show only a few carefully currated estimates. Applied research involves a complex array of analytical decisions, often leading to a 'garden of forking paths' where each choice can lead to different results. By systematically exploring how alternative analytical choices affect the findings, Multiverse Analysis reveals the full range of estimates that the data can support and uncovers insights that single-path anlyses often miss. It shows which modeling decisions are most critical to the results and reveals how data and assumptions work together to produce empirical estimates. Focusing on intuitive understanding rather than complex mathematics and drawing on real-world datasets, this book provides a step-by-step guide to comprehensive multiverse analysis. Go beyond traditional, single-path methods and discover how multiverse analysis can lead to more transparent, illuminating, and persuasive empirical contributions to science."

Bios:

Cristobal Young is Associate Professor of Sociology at Cornell University. He received his PhD from Princeton Universtiy in 2010. His first book, The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight: How Place Still Matters for the Rich, was published by Stanford University Press in 2017.

Erin Cumberworth is a researcher in the Department of Sociology at Cornell University. She received her PhD from Stanford University in 2017. Her work has been published in journals such as Sociological Methods & Research and the ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 

Description

IES Luigi Einaudi Distinguished Lecture
Growing inequality and the decline of the American dream are marked by a mental health crisis across all social classes in the United States. I consider what alternative hopes are taking shape based on interviews with 80 Gen Zs and 185 agents of change who are producing new narratives in entertainment, comedy, advocacy, art, impact investing, and other fields of activity. They are offering alternatives to neoliberal scripts of self by producing narratives that emphasize inclusion, authenticity, and sustainability. They contribute to social movements that aim to extend recognition to the largest numbers, even in a context where political backlashes are multiplying. These transformations point to how to broaden cultural citizenship, not only in the United States but in other societies.

Michèle Lamont is Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies and the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies at Harvard University. Born in 1957, she grew up in Quebec and studied political theory at the University of Ottawa before obtaining a doctorate in sociology at the University of Paris in 1983. After completing post-doctoral research at Stanford University, she has served on the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin (1985-87), Princeton University (1987-2002) and Harvard University (2003-present). A cultural and comparative sociologist who studies inclusion and inequality, she has researched how we evaluate social worth across societies, the role of cultural processes in fostering inequality, symbolic and social boundaries, and the evaluation of knowledge, as well as topics such as dignity, stigma, racism, class cultures, collective well-being, social resilience, and social change. Her books include Money, Morals and Manners: the Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class (1992), The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration(2000), How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgement (2009), Getting Respect: Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the Us, Brazil and Israel (coauthored, 2016), and Seeing Others: How Recognition Works and How It Can Heal a Divided World (2023). She is also the author of several collective works, and over a hundred articles published in American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Annual Review of Sociology, Human Nature Behavior, and other prominent outlets.

Description

Description:

People possess multiple identities, the relative salience of which responds dynamically to social context. Whether one thinks of oneself as a parent, an employee, a spouse, a particular gender, or an American varies from place to place and time to time. National identity in particular is a crucial master frame through which people understand their sense of collective belonging and their political choices. Yet, research on national identification has been limited to cross-sectional data, often gathered using single survey items, which fail to take into account the contextually of identity. With large-scale social media data a different approach is possible. Our study traces daily fluctuations in American identification using a random sample of U.S. Twitter/X users between 2012 and 2022. Because identifying tweets that engage with nationhood is akin to looking for a needle in a haystack, we employ few-shot classification using Llama 2, a large language model, combined with fine-tuning to further improve model performance. Our findings reveal that American identification rises and falls in a patterned manner, partly in response to nation-relevant events widely reported in the media. We show which events have the largest impact on nationalism time trends, estimate the collective half-life of identification events, and examine which events are politically galvanizing versus polarizing. In particular, we find that national identification gained chronic salience after 2016, when it first became a central point of contention in U.S. presidential elections.

Bio:

Bart Bonikowski is Associate Professor of Sociology and Politics at New York University. Using relational survey methods, computational text analysis, and experimental research, his work applies insights from cultural sociology to the study of politics in the United States and Europe, with a particular focus on nationalism, populism, and radical-right parties.