The Center for Cultural Sociology provides a focus for meaning-centered analysis and explanation in the social science tradition. Drawing on classical and contemporary social and cultural theory, CCS students and researchers develop concepts and methods that illuminate the cultural texture of social life at both individual and collective levels. They apply these to understanding the full range of activities and processes from local to global levels. Although Yale is associated with the Strong Program in Cultural Sociology CCS faculty, students and speakers make use of the full range of theoretical perspectives and methods we find in the discipline today. Central to CCS institutional life is a weekly workshop, which features presenters from all parts of the career scale - from globally leading scholars to PhD students. We also host conferences and mini-conferences on an annual basis, and host many visitors. Lastly the CCS plays a key role in running the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, and a Palgrave Macmillan book series in cultural sociology. Through activities such as these, as well as our comprehensive graduate training program, the CCS has become an intellectual ‘home’ for a substantial global network of like-minded scholars (link to Faculty Fellows page) concerned with how culture matters in shaping the social world.
The CCS Directors and students maintain active research programs. The lines of ongoing research include:
- Building cultural theory. A big part of our mission is to better theorize the structure of meanings and the way these influence social action at levels from the interpersonal to the global. The CCS is known for developing many new conceptual tools for this activity.
- The study of various empirical domains in which meaning shapes social life. In the past decade topics that have led to substantial monographs have included war and cultural trauma, punishment, climate change, the civil sphere, collective memory.
- Ongoing projects and works in progress by CCS Faculty include collective memory and politics in Turkey, mystery and the pursuit of the sacred in the social imaginary, the meanings of climate change, and the operations of the civil sphere in diverse regional contexts.
- Ongoing graduate student projects include studies of political performance, public intellectuals, social movements, interpersonal relationships, and popular culture.