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All Conference Sessions: Humanities Quadrangle, Room 136, 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM.
Reception ~ Friday October 25, 5-8 PM, Room 131.
We are sorry that registration is now closed ~~ the conference has reached full capacity.
The Yale Center for Cultural Sociology is hosting the conference, “Working towards Meaning Together: Jeffrey Alexander’s Legacy for Sociology,” marking the retirement of CCS Founding Director Jeffrey Alexander on October 25 & 26, 2024. For over half a century, Jeff has been prolific, making multiple contributions as a leading figure in social theory and cultural sociology. Motifs, agendas, discoveries and fields that are inescapably associated with him include the Strong Program, iconic power, the binary codes of civil society, neofunctionalism, social performance, theoretical logic, the civil sphere, and Durkheimian cultural sociology.
The Conference will host a selected pool of invited scholars from around the world as they assess and explain this legacy. Importantly, this is not merely a party or celebration. It is a working event organized around a festschrift-in-the making, edited by Celso Villegas (Kenyon College) and Galen Watts (Waterloo University). Contributors to this book, along with other invited scholars, have all worked closely with Jeff, have made independent use of his ideas, or have been his most engaged critics. The conference will give particular emphasis to the relationship between frontstage and backstage in the origin of paradigms. In addition to discussion of established themes related to theory and intellectual history, it will also look at personal ties, global flows, intergenerational baton-passing, and the peculiar role of institutions and places.
Special thank you to CCS Junior Fellow Shivani Choudhary for her assistance with this event!
Generously funded by the Center for Cultural Sociology and The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale.