Participants

Jeffrey Alexander ~ Yale University ~ United States

Jeffrey Alexander is the Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Yale University, founder and Director Emeritus of Yale’s Center for Cultural Sociology, and co-editor of The American Journal of Cultural Sociology. A social theorist whose early work challenged the anti-cultural reductionism of classical and modern sociology, Alexander has worked with generations of students and colleagues to create a “strong program” in cultural sociology. Synthesizing late Durkheim with semiotics, poststructuralism, and cultural anthropology, he has conceptualized, not only models of deep cultural structure, but theories of cultural trauma, social performance, and material iconicity. Alexander has also developed ”civil sphere theory,” a macro-sociological model of democracy and the forces that can undermine it. He is currently organizing a series of conference/edited book projects: The Civil Sphere in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2018),  The Civil Sphere in East Asia (CUP, 2017), Breaching the Civil Order: Radicalism and the Civil Sphere (CUP, 2018), and The Nordic Civil Sphere (Polity, 2019). The Civil Sphere and Populism (Polity, 2020), The Canadian Civil Sphere (UBC Press, 2022), and The Civil Sphere in India (Polity, forthcoming). His most recent book is What Makes a Social Crisis: The Societalization of Social Problems (Polity 2020). Press. His most recent article is “Office Obligation as Civil Virtue: The Crisis of America Democracy, November 3, 2020 - January 6, 2021, and After” (Society, 2023).

ORGANIZER

Philip Smith ~ Yale University ~ United States

Philip Smith is Professor of Sociology, Director of the Center for Cultural Sociology and co-editor of the American Journal of Cultural Sociology. Smith writes in the area of social and cultural theory as well as empirical cultural sociology. He works mostly from a Durkheimian perspective and is a noted contributor to the Strong Program. His most recent book is Durkheim and After: The Durkheimian Tradition, 1893-2020 (Polity, 2020). This is the first sustained attempt a big picture view of both Durkheim and his legacy in sociology, anthropology and explanatory social theory. Other research monographs include Why War? The Cultural Logic of Iraq, the Gulf War and Suez (Chicago, 2005); Punishment and Culture (Chicago 2008); Incivility: The Rude Stranger in Everyday Life (co-authored. Cambridge, 2010) and Climate Change as Social Drama (with N. Howe. Cambridge 2016). In addition Smith is author or editor of several textbooks and edited volumes, and over seventy chapters and refereed articles. His ongoing projects in the academic year 2023/24 include a mixed method study of the composer Richard Wagner and the Bayreuth Festival; an investigation of shifting climate change media representation using ‘big data’; an effort to challenge conventional understandings of Durkheim’s collective effervesence; and thinking about the role of ‘mystery’ in social life as a dimension of the sacred.

SPEAKERS

Nelson Arteaga Botello ~ Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales ~ Mexico

Nelson Arteaga is Professor of Sociology at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO-Mexico), member, since 2011, of the Mexican Academy of Sciences, and Faculty Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. Researcher within the Mexican National Research System (Level III). He also has served as Dean of Political and Social Sciences at the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico (UAEM). His fields of research are cultural sociology, violence, surveillance, and sociological theory. In 2005, he won the 5^th Ibero-American Social Sciences Prize awarded by the Institute of Social Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). His publications include Semantics of in Mexico. Violence: Revolt and Political Assassination (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2022); “Strong program cultural sociology and Latin America”, American Journal of Cultural Sociology (2020, with C. Tognato); “‘It Was the State’: the Trauma of the Enforced Disappearance of Students in Mexico,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society (2019); “The Populist Transition and the Civil Sphere in Mexico,” Populism in the Civil Sphere (Polity, edited by J.C. Alexander, G. Sciortino y P. Kivisto).

Peter Beilharz ~ Sichuan University

Peter Beilharz is Professor of Critical Theory at Sichuan University. For many years he was Professor of Sociology at La Trobe University in Melbourne. He has been affiliated with the Yale Center; Harvard; Leeds; Curtin; and Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study. He has published more than thirty books, many on the work of Zygmunt Bauman and on art historian Bernard Smith; most recently Circling Marx, 2000, The Work of History, with Sian Supski, 2022, The Photographs of Zygmunt Bauman, with Janet Wolff, 2023, and Chain’s Towards the Blues, 2023, but he rates his most important work as the project of Thesis Eleven and the textbook with Trevor Hogan, Sociology–Place, Time and Division, 2007, this latter supported by Jeff in his Australian sojourn of 2004.

Paul Colomy ~ University of Denver

While a graduate student at UCLA in the late-1970s and early-1980s, Paul Colomy studied with Jeffrey C. Alexander. With Jeff, he co-edited Differentiation Theory and Social Change and co-authored several articles and book chapters. He also edited Functionalist Sociology, Neofunctionalist Sociology, and The Dynamics of Social Systems. His subsequent work focused on institutional change, social control, the self and social theory, his articles appearing in Social Problems, Sociological Forum, Sociological Theory, The Sociological Quarterly, Sociological Focus and in other venues. Currently, he is Professor Emeritus at the University of Denver and is studying the origins of the juvenile court.

Jean-François Côté ~ Université du Québece à Montréal

Jean-François Côté is professor at the Departement of sociology of Université du Québece à Montréal. His interests in culture, America societies, hermeneutics, theatre, sociological theory and epistemology, have developed in several books and articles over the last decades. He has published recently Jeffrey Alexander and Cultural Sociology (Polity, 2023), and prior to that, La Renaissance du théâtre autochtone. Métamorphose des Amériques I (Presses de l’Université Laval, 2017) and George Herbert Mead’s Concept of Society : A Critical Reconstruction (Routledge, 2015).
 

Mustafa Emirbayer ~ University of Wisconsin, Madison

Mustafa Emirbayer is the John Dewey Professor of Sociology and Social Thought at UW-Madison. He has published extensively on social theory, race, and the relation between sociology and psychoanalysis. He also is the author of “The Alexander School of Cultural Sociology” (Thesis Eleven, 2004) and the coauthor, with Molly Noble, of “The Peculiar
Convergence of Jeffrey Alexander and Erik Olin Wright” (Theory and Society 2013).

Ronald Jacobs ~ State University of New York at Albany

Ron Jacobs is Professor of Sociology at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He is the author of Race, Media, and the Crisis of Civil Society (Cambridge University Press), and the co-author of Cultural Sociology (Blackwell), The Space of Opinion (Oxford University Press), and Living Sociologically (Oxford University Press), as well as the co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology. Together with Jeff Alexander and Phil Smith, Ron is co-founder and co-editor of the American Journal of Cultural Sociology.

Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky ~ Masaryk University ~ Czech Republic

B. Nadya Jaworsky is an associate professor of sociology at Masaryk University, Brno, Czechia, and Faculty Fellow at Yale University’s Center for Cultural Sociology. Recent books include Historicizing Roma in Central Europe: Between Critical Whiteness and Epistemic Injustice (with Victoria Shmidt, Routledge 2021), and A Critical Cultural Sociological Exploration of Attitudes toward Migration in Czechia: What Lies Beneath the Fear of the Thirteenth Migrant (with Radka Klvaňová, Ivana Rapoš Božič, Alica Rétiová, and Jan Kotýnek Krotký, Lexington Books, 2023). She has published recently in American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Migration Studies, Visual Studies, and the Journal of Nationalism, Memory & Language Politics. Her current research focuses on developing a critical cultural sociology of migration.

Anne Kane ~ Center for Cultural Sociology Senior Fellow

Anne Kane retired as Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Houston Downtown. She also taught at UT Austin, Haverford College and UC Dublin. As a graduate student, she was a founding member of the UCLA “Culture Club” and is now a Sr. Fellow at the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology. Her articles in Sociological Theory, “Cultural Analysis and Historical Sociology: The Analytic and Concrete Forms of the Autonomy of Culture” (1991) and “Theorizing Meaning Construction in Social Movements: Symbolic Structures and Interpretation during the Irish Land War, 1879-1882” (1997) are demonstrative of the Strong Program in Culture Sociology, as is her book Constructing Irish Nationalist Identity: Ritual and Discourse during the Land War, 1879-1882, Palgrave (2011). She is currently researching the Irish Republican Movement and the Northern Ireland conflict, focusing on the performance of political violence and the construction and processes of counterpublics. Her first publication on the IRA, “The Civil Sphere and Revolutionary Violence: the Irish Republican Movement, 1970-1998.” is a chapter in Breaching the Civil Order: Radicalism and the Civil Sphere, edited by Jeffrey Alexander, Trevor Stack and Farhad Khosrokhavar, Cambridge University Press (2020). She is the co-editor (with Dieter Reinisch) of the volume Irish Republican Counterpublic: Armed Struggle and the Construction of a Radical Nationalist Community in Northern Ireland, 1969-1998, Routledge (2022).

Peter Kivisto ~ Augustana College

Peter Kivisto is the Richard A. Swanson Professor of Social Thought Emeritus at Augustana College. The Academy of Finland appointed him Finland Distinguished Professor at the University of Turku, and he was subsequently awarded an honorary doctorate by the university.  His research focuses on immigration, social integration, and civil society.  Recent books include Research Handbook on the Sociology of Migration (edited with Giuseppe Sciortino and Martina Cvajner, Edward Elgar, 2024), The Cambridge Handbook of Social Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Populism in the Civil Sphere (edited with Jeffrey C. Alexander and Giuseppe Sciortino, Polity, 2021), The Trump Phenomenon: How the Politics of Populism Won in 2016 (Emerald, 2017), and Solidarity, Justice, and Incorporation: Thinking through The Civil Sphere (edited with Giuseppe Sciortino, Oxford University Press, 2015).

Agnes Ku ~ Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Agnes Shuk-mei Ku is Associate Professor of Social Science at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She is affiliated with the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University and has previously cochaired a research committee (sociological theory) of the International Sociological Association. Her research interests include cultural sociology, civil society, urban space, social movement and identity issues in Hong Kong. She has published widely in such journals as American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, International Sociology, Sociological Theory, Theory, Culture and Society, The China Quarterly, and The China Journal.

Maria Luengo Cruz ~ Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

María Luengo is an associate professor of journalism at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Spain), Faculty Fellow of Yale University’s Center for Cultural Sociology and member of the Civil Sphere Theory Working Group’s Coordinating Committee. She chairs the EU COST Action Redressing Radical Polarization: Strengthening European Civil Spheres facing Illiberal Digital Media (DepolarizingEU). Her research interests focus on the relationship of journalism and the civil sphere – and how the media play a crucial role in meaning-making processes in today’s societies. Recent books include The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered: Democratic Culture, Professional Codes, Digital Future (co-edited with Alexander and Breese, Cambridge University Press, 2016) and News Media Innovation Reconsidered (co-edited with Susana Herrera Damas, Wiley, 2021). Her research has appeared in Journalism, Journalism Studies, European Journal of Communication, American Journal of Cultural Sociology and Media, Culture & Society, among other leading journals in the fields of communication and sociology. Her article on “Journalism, solidarity and the civil sphere” was awarded with the 2019 European Journal of Communication prize. She has been involved in several international conference/book projects on the civil sphere, the media, radicalization and populism in Europe. 

Keywords: Journalism, civil sphere theory, journalistic impartiality, social polarization, cultural sociology, performativity

X @MariaLuengoC

Anna Lund ~ Stockholm University

Anna Lund is a Professor of Sociology at Stockholm University. Cultural sociological perspectives and ethnographic methods characterize her research, as well as a theoretical concern with social change and cultural transformation under conditions of adversity. Her current research interest is connected to how modes of incorporation is performed in school settings among and for migrant students as well as in Swedish children’s theater. She employs civil sphere theory, with intersectional perspectives, at the microlevel by investigating interactional and organizational processes in school and theater contexts. Lund has been part of the CCS community since she came as a visiting Ph.D. student in the fall of 2004. Over the years, she has actively supported and developed cultural sociology in the Nordic region. She is part of the Coordinating Committee of the Civil Sphere Working Group and a member of the Editorial Board for the American Journal of Cultural Sociology. In 2019, she co-edited The Nordic Civil Sphere with Jeffrey C. Alexander and Andrea Voyer.

Jason Mast ~ Center for Cultural Sociology Faculty Fellow

Jason L. Mast arrives at this event having been a student of Paul Colomy’s at the University of Denver. From Denver, he joined Jeff Alexander at UCLA and participated in the Culture Club during its final years, or after figures like Phil Smith and Ron Jacobs earned their PhDs and departed the university but before the impactful figure Steve Jay Sherwood exited the scene. Next, Jason joined Jeff at Yale, where he contributed as a junior fellow to the development of the Center for Cultural Sociology, and where he participated in the CCS’s early collaborations with Bernd Giesen’s Konstanzer Group. After Yale, he served as a Research Mitarbeiter at Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen, Germany, held a Global Research Fellowship at the University of Warwick, and participated in the Normative Orders Excellence Cluster at Goethe University Frankfurt as a research fellow. Most recently, as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Research Fellow, he was able to return to the CCS as a visiting research fellow, and to enjoy the collegiality of Giuseppe Sciortino and colleagues at the University of Trento. During these years, Jason co-edited volumes with Jeff titled Social Performance and the Politics of Meaning in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. His forthcoming article, “Societalized Politics in the German Civil Sphere: The 2015 ‘Refugee Crisis’ and Post-Potsdam Civil Backlash,” which he co-authored with Daniel Suber, one of Bernd Giesen’s former students, is forthcoming in the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society.  

Lisa McCormick ~ University of Edinburgh

Lisa McCormick is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh and Faculty Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. Her research in music draws on her background as a conservatory-trained cellist. She is the author of Performing Civility (Cambridge University Press 2015), the first study analysing the social aspects of international classical music competitions. For the 18th International Chopin Piano Competition held in Warsaw in 2021, she was invited by the Chopin Institute to co-host “Chopin Talk”, an interview segment that was part of the English-language coverage of the competition livestreamed on YouTube for a global audience. In 2022, she guest edited a special issue on the cultural sociology of art and music for the American Journal of Cultural Sociology. This was expanded into an edited collection that was published by Palgrave Macmillan. Her articles have appeared in Cultural Sociology, The Chopin Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Contemporary Social Science, and Sociologia & Anthropologia. From 2016-2020, she was co-editor of Cultural Sociology, an official journal of the British Sociological Association.

Isaac Ariail Reed ~ University of Virginia

Isaac Ariail Reed is Thomas C. Sorenson Professor of Political and Social Thought and Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. His work began with studies of the Salem Witch Trials and hermeneutic sociology, expanded into a study of interpretation and explanation in the human sciences, and then to the sociology of power and transitions to modernity. He has written about the Whiskey Rebellion, Bacon’s Rebellion, the French Revolution, the Cold War, science fiction, the idea of the human sciences, and the intellectual history of political and social theory. At the core of his work are three ideas: (1) transitions to modernity transformed social and political life; (2) signification is source of immense variation in history and society, because it is a fundamental component of action, motivation, and performance; and (3) social structure may be usefully conceptualized as hierarchical networks of agency relations. He graduated with a B.A. in Mathematics and Sociology & Anthropology from Swarthmore College in 2000. In 2007, he earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale University. He is the author of Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the use of theory in the human sciences (2011), Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King’s Two Bodies (2020), and Sociology as a Human Science: Essays on Interpretation and Causal Pluralism (2023), and the co-editor of Social Theory Now (2017) and The New Pragmatist Sociology: Inquiry, Agency, and Democracy (2022).

Giuseppe Sciortino ~ Università di Trento

Giuseppe Sciortino teaches sociology at the Università di Trento, Italy. He is interested in social theory, international migration, and the cultural dimension of sexual and erotic life. He participates in the civil sphere theory network. He has recently edited, together with Martina Cvajner and Peter Kivisto, The Research Handbook in the Sociology of Migration (Edward Elgar, 2024).

Lynette Spillman ~ University of Notre Dame

Lyn Spillman’s research investigates long-term cultural processes in the economy and polity. She explored economic culture in Solidarity in Strategy: Making Business Meaningful in American Trade Associations (University of Chicago Press, 2012), awarded the Viviana Zelizer Award for Best Book in Economic Sociology and the Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book in Cultural Sociology. Earlier research, in Nation and Commemoration: Creating National Identities in the United States and Australia (Cambridge University Press, 1997) compares the long-term development of national identities in two similar settler societies. She has pursued her interest in developing cultural sociology in What is Cultural Sociology? (Polity, 2020), as editor of Cultural Sociology (Blackwell, 2002) and in articles, chapters, and special issues on cultural theory and methodology, economic culture, nationalism, and collective memory. She received her Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and she is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, Her work has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship and an ASA/NSF Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline Award. and as Visiting Fellow at the CCS, Yale and at the MaxPo Center for Instability in Market Societies, Sciences Po. Her current interests focus on public economic culture and economic nationalism.

Anne Taylor ~ Yale University

Anne Taylor is a cultural sociologist of religion, media, and politics at Yale University. Her research explores the ways in which people find joy and belonging in life, including how they overcome structural and symbolic obstacles to do so. Taylor is particularly interested in theorizing the interpretive agency of audiences in social performance, as well as the blurring lines between religion and the secular, to capture the lived realities of people whose political, religious, or cultural lives do not fit within existing sociological constructs. She’s conducted research of Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, travel writer Rick Steves’ PBS television show, guidebooks, and tours of Europe, racialization in college football coaching, white Christian nationalism in CrossFit, and a Harry Potter podcast. Currently, Taylor is a PhD candidate and a Junior Fellow at the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology. Her dissertation theorizes the concepts of charisma, enchantment, and the sacred through the lens of “performing religion” and case studies of media, sport, and travel. She’s published peer-reviewed articles in Cultural Sociology, the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Sociologica, and Material Religion. Prior to Yale, Taylor earned a B.A. in History from Gordon College in Massachusetts and a second B.A. (summa cum laude with highest honors) in Sociology from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Since 2021, Taylor’s been affiliated as research fellow at the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture in the Department of Media Studies at CU-Boulder. In addition to her academic career, Taylor has worked for Apple, Twitter, and Bernie 2016.

Carlo Tognato ~ Center for Cultural Sociology Faculty Fellow

Carlo Tognato has been Faculty Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale since 2005. More recently, he was Research Fellow at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota and Senior Policy Fellow at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. Before returning to the US in 2019, he was for over a decade associate professor of sociology at the National University of Colombia in Bogota, where he also directed for four years the Center for Social Studies.   He attended Jeff Alexander’s graduate seminar in cultural sociology back in 2000 as he was completing the second year in his PhD program in Political Science at UCLA. That encounter with Jeff completely changed Carlo’s intellectual trajectory and Jeff ended up co-chairing his PhD dissertation committee at UCLA. Since then, Carlo has been a contributor to the Strong Program in cultural sociology and to the Cultural Sociology Series at Palgrave-Macmillan. During the last decade Carlo’s work has focused on civil sphere theory.

Frédéric Vandenberghe ~ Federal University of Rio de Janeiro / Hamburg Institute of Advanced Study

Frédéric Vandenberghe is professor of sociology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil where he also directs the Social Theory Lab Sociofilo. He’s currently a senior fellow at the Hamburg Institute of Advanced Study. Fred has published widely on the history of ideas and various aspects of social theory in English, French and Portuguese. He’s one of the editors of MAUSS International and co-chair of the Research Committee on Sociological Theory (RC 16) of the ISA. In English, he published A Philosophical History of German Sociology (2009), What’s Critical about Critical Realism? (2014) and co-authored with Alain Caillé For a New Classic Sociology (2021). He’s currently working on a book on political hermeneutics that analyses the situation in Brazil under Bolsonaro and another one on Anti-utilitarian social theory.

Celso Villegas ~ Kenyon College

Celso M. Villegas is Associate Professor of Sociology at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio USA. He works on the relationship between social class and the civil sphere, with emphasis on the middle class in the Philippines, Venezuela, and Ecuador. His has recently published “The Civil Sphere and Social Class” in in the journal Cultural Sociology (2023) and “Towards a New Cultural Sociology of the Latin American Middle Class: Ecuador’s Middle-Class Revolution as Collective Representation” in edited volume The Middle Classes in Latin America: Subjectivities, Practices, and Genealogies (2022).

Robin Wagner-Pacifici ~ The New School / University of Pennsylvania

Robin Wagner-Pacifici is a University Professor Emerita at the New School and a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. She has written five books on conflict and its termination: The Art of Surrender: Decomposing Sovereignty at Conflict’s End (2005), Theorizing the Standoff: Contingency in Action, (2000), Discourse and Destruction: The City of Philadelphia vs MOVE (1994), The Moro Morality Play: Terrorism as Social Drama (1986), and What is an Event? (2017).  A collaboration analyzing official national security texts has drawn from both hermeneutic and computational approaches to textual analysis and generated several publications, including “Graphing the Grammar of Motives in U.S. National Security Strategies: Cultural Interpretation, Automated Text Analysis and the Drama of Global Politics,” (Poetics, 2013 co-authored with John W. Mohr, Ronald L. Breiger, and Petko Bogdanov). Current work on the challenges regarding the times, spaces, and actions of the public sphere include case studies of various modes of public sphere occupation and theoretical explorations of charisma and anti-charisma.

Galen Watts ~ University of Waterloo

Galen Watts is an Assistant Professor in the Sociology and Legal Studies department at the University of Waterloo. Between 2020-2022 he was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow based jointly at KU Leuven and the University of Toronto. His research focuses on cultural and institutional change in liberal democracies since the 1960s—with a focus on the spheres of religion, morality, work, and politics. His first book, The Spiritual Turn: The Religion of the Heart and the Making of Romantic Liberal Modernity, published in 2022 with Oxford University Press, won the 2023 Society for the Scientific Study of Religion’s Distinguished Book Award, and received an Honorable Mention for the 2023 Best Book Award from the ASA’s Section on Altruism, Morality and Social Solidarity. You can find out more about him and his work at his website: www.galenwatts.com.

Eric Taylor Woods ~ Plymouth University

CHAIRS

SESSION ONE
Dmitry Kurakin ~ Yale University
SESSION TWO
Shivani Choudhary ~ Yale University
SESSION THREE
Marcel Knöchelmann ~ Yale University
SESSION FOUR
Dorothy Wu ~ Yale University
SESSION SIX
Nicolás Rudas ~ Yale University
SESSION SEVEN
Sena Şahin ~ Yale University
SESSION EIGHT
Carla Escobar Ortiz ~ Yale University
SESSION NINE
Willa Sachs ~ Yale University