Department of Sociology

Description

Adam Reich, Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, will give a talk as part of the Sociology Colloquium spring series.

TALK TITLE: 

Inside Jobs: Prison Work in the American Labor Market

Abstract:  

It is easy to think of prison work as the opposite of work on the free market: The prisoner working without pay in the mess hall, or making license plates for $0.40 an hour, seems more comparable to an enslaved person than to someone working a job on the outside, however bad that job may be. Such a distinction is baked into our common sense and into our jurisprudence, and it has played an important symbolic role in American political and social life, from the earliest campaigns of the American labor movement to the modern-day prison reform movement.  But it obscures as much as it clarifies. It masks the coercion underlying systems of “free” labor, as well as the different forms of freedom that incarcerated people have occasionally exercised in relationship to their work inside. Rather than view prison work as the opposite of “free” labor, then, Inside Jobs considers the prison as an important site in which ideas and practices about the relationship between work, coercion, and freedom have been developed and contested across different periods of American economic history.

Description

David Melamed, Professor of Sociology at The Ohio State University, will give a talk as part of the Sociology Colloquium spring series: 

How to stop the emergence of segregation in cooperative networks

David Melamed, The Ohio State University

Abstract: Cooperation among animals is a paradox because individuals are better off not cooperating with others. One prevalent explanation for the high levels of cooperation we observe among humans is the effect of the network structures in which we are embedded. Clustering structurally insulates cooperators, enabling high rates of cooperation within network communities or clusters. At the same time, we know that networks are clustered by demographic attributes. Taken together, the result is demographically similar clusters with high rates of cooperation. That is, these two processes generate the emergence of cooperative but segregated clusters. Here we present two studies on these processes. Study 1 documents the results described above, and study two systematically varies types of reputations. We find that we can eliminate the emergence of segregation by altering the types of reputations that are used in the networks. I conclude with a discussion of reducing segregation in polarized contexts.

Description

Temporariness and Belonging in a “free country”

In Malaysia, the incorporation of Nepali, mostly male, migrants as “foreign workers” has created the conditions within which they have come to see themselves as “foreigners” or just “workers” in “someone else’s place” (arkako thau). On the other hand, frequent references to Malaysia as a “free country”—where one can freely roam around and indulge in sex and alcohol unlike the Gulf where “one can’t even look a girl in the eye”; where people “forget” their country and family and “disappear” never to return; and where the hawapani (air and water) is, if not the same, better than Nepal—also signal forms of belonging. While these narratives reflect betrayal as an absent provider to both family and the nation, they also reflect failures and deviance from normative scripts and bounds of respectability and law and reveal a world of contestation, where ways of being otherwise exist not despite but through their particular predicaments as “foreign workers.” The talk examines this dual sense of exclusion and inclusion through which Nepali migrants experience work and life in Malaysia and asks what life-making and freedom might mean in a context of enforced temporariness.

Sampreety is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell.