The Workshop in Cultural Sociology is designed to be a permanent, ongoing part of the Graduate curriculum. We meet weekly on Friday throughout the Fall and Spring semesters.
The Advanced Seminar in Cultural Sociology (Supper Club) is an effort to create a forum for student interaction and mutual reading of ongoing student work.
A number of of additional graduate and undergraduate courses have been created and are taught by the CCS Directors and occasionally by Visiting Professors.
The CCS Annual Spring Conference
The CCS Spring Conference is the major annual event of the Center for Cultural Sociology. Each year the conference features contributions from CCS Fellows ~ from New Haven, the United States and around the world ~ who are working with leading issues in cultural sociology.
The Yale Center for Cultural Sociology hosted 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 hosted 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.
Link to Working towards Meaning Together: Jeffrey Alexander’s Legacy for Sociology (PDF)
Building on many years of collaboration with cultural sociologists at Fudan University in Shanghai, China and generously funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, The Center for Cultural Sociology organized an exciting three-day conference, Cultural Sociology East & West on September 15-17, 2023. Twenty-seven cultural sociologists from East Asia, Europe, and North America presented papers. CCS Junior Fellows, Visiting Fellows, and Post-Doctoral Fellows - along with several non-Yale doctoral students who accompanied conference participants - chaired each session and provided bracing 15 minute responses. The intellectual quality of the papers and discussions was high, and the 3 days provided, as well, a lot of time for informal conversation. Networks expanded and future collaborations were mapped out. We expect that a special issue of the American Journal of Cultural Sociology will eventually emerge from the conference, and possibly a book as well. Stay tuned!
Thank you to CCS Assistant Student Nicolás Rudas and the team of Yale Graduate students and CCS Visiting Students who cheerfully pitched in when needed and made our guests feel at home at Yale!
Special thank you to Lina Chan at the MacMillan Center for her support and guidance over the years for our collaboration with Fudan University.
Link to Cultural Sociology East & West Conference Program (PDF)
CCS Director Ron Eyerman retired from Yale at the end of 2018. Ron’s CCS Co-Directors Jeff Alexander and Phil Smith gathered a group of researchers who have worked with Ron on various projects over the course of his career to reflect on Ron’s scholarly contribution to Sociology. This day also gave Ron’s colleagues, students and friends an opportunity to thank him and celebrate his career.
Link to Performing collegiality: A tribute to Ron Eyerman (PDF) - Lisa McCormick (University of Edinburgh)
Hosted by the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology, the Center for Customer Insights at the Yale School of Management, and Yale Sociology, the cross disciplinary symposium was designed to spark dialogue and debate on critical issues and themes in contemporary consumption studies between key scholars in cultural sociology, economic sociology, consumer research, and marketing studies. In addition, there were several concurrent paper development sessions for advanced research by early career scholars. Panels focused on topics such as fault lines and foci in the sociological study of consumption and markets, race in the marketplace, narrating consumption, sociological perspectives on brands, and making a difference through consumption studies.
Symposium Panelists included leading scholars contributing to The Oxford Handbook of Consumption (edited by Frederick Wherry and Ian Woodward), council members from the American Sociological Association Consumers & Consumption Section, the Association of Consumer Research, and leadership from the Consumer Culture Theory Consortium in Marketing, such as: Jeffrey C. Alexander, Eric Arnould, Melissa Aronzyck, Shyon Baumann, Nina Bandelj, Daniel Cook, Ravi Dhar, Amber Epp, Sonya Grier, Geraldine Henderson, Omar Lizardo, Cristina Mora, Albert Muñiz, Allison Pugh, Craig Thompson, and Melanie Wallendorf.
Symposium Organizers:
Ian Woodward, University of Southern Denmark
Frederick F. Wherry, Yale University
Michelle Weinberger, Northwestern University
Craig Thompson, University of Wisconsin at Madison
Juliet Schor, Boston College
Marissa King, Yale School of Management
(in reverse alphabetical order)
Symposium Sponsors:
Yale Center for Cultural Sociology
The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund
Center for Customer Insights at the Yale School of Management
Medill School, Northwestern University
Journal of Consumer Research
Consumer Culture Theory Consortium
Yale Department of Sociology
Link to Consumers and Consumption @ Yale Symposium Program (PDF)
On Friday, April 25, Saturday, April 26 and Sunday, April 27, 2014 we hosted speakers covering a wide range of topics in cultural sociology, especially meaning-centered analyses in the social science tradition, with openings to normative themes such as democracy, justice, tolerance, civility, sacrality, and the meaningful dimensions of market exchange.
Our seven keynote speakers were Mustafa Emirbayer, Bernhard Giesen, Andreas Glaeser, Michèle Lamont, Paul Lichterman, Lyn Spillman, and Robin Wagner-Pacifici. The CCS Directors also delivered papers along with four of our outstanding recent Ph.D’s, Lisa McCormick, Jason Mast, Matthew Norton and Dominik Bartmanski.
Special thanks to Carolyn Ly, Assistant Conference Coordinator & to our panel session chairs & assistants: Sorcha Brophy, Anne Marie Champagne, Andrew Cohen, Thomas Crosbie, Martina Cvajner, Shai Dromi, Alison Gerber, Till Hilmar, Isabel Jijon, Jin Su Joo, Muyang Li, Anne Lin, Todd Madigan, Brian Mckernan, Nickie Michaud Wild, Michael Perlt, Elham Pourtaher & Christine Slaughter.
Co-sponsored by the Whitney Humanities Center.
Link to CCS Anniversary Conference ~ Advancing Cultural Sociology (PDF)
“Money Talks at Yale,” a symposium focusing on the power of money in society and social influences on its formation and use, featured an international group of scholars and experts on the topic who gathered on campus on Friday, Sept. 12, 2014
The symposium turned on its head the notion that money always has an undue influence in politics, or that money has the power to push people to do things they might not do otherwise. The speakers examined the notion that money transforms as much as it troubles, and that social actors still have a say. The Yale symposium also recognized the 20th anniversary of the publication “The Social Meaning of Money,” the renowned book by Princeton sociology professor Viviana Zelizer, and focused on the important social policy and disciplinary advances her work continues to inspire.
Speakers included Jonathan Morduch, New York University; Supriya Singh, RMIT University-Australia, Bill Maurer, University of California-Irvine; Christine Desan, Harvard University; Nancy Folbre, University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Nigel Dodd, London School of Economics; Bruce Carruthers, Northwestern University; and Arlie Hochschild, University of California-Berkeley.
The conference is hosted by Frederick Wherry, professor of sociology and co-director of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale; Nina Bandelj, professor of sociology and co-director of the Center for Organizational Research at the University of California-Irvine; and Daniel Markovits, professor of law at Yale.
The symposium was co-sponsored by the Office of the Provost at Yale, the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology, the Center for Organizational Research at the University of California-Irvine, the Yale Center for Comparative Research, the Yale Law School, the Yale School of Management, and the Whitney Humanities Center. Special thanks to Carolyn Ly, Assistant Conference Coordinator.
October 19 ~ October 21, 2007
The late Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) is now recognized as a true giant of social and cultural theory. He has had a profound impact on the human sciences, influencing both theory and method across a raft of disciplines from anthropology, to history, sociology, religious studies, cultural studies and area studies. Geertz is synonymous with a range of concepts and images: the cockfight, the wink, thick description, webs of meaning…the list could go on. This density of automatic reference and instantaneous recognition is found only very rarely and with the most influential thinkers. One sees it with Marx and Weber for example. Geertz’s masterwork The Interpretation of Cultures is routinely cited in lists of the most influential social science books of the past half century. A look at the social science citation index shows some six thousand citations to this book alone book. Geertz has been translated into twenty languages. The fact is that Geertz is now seen as the emblematic figure for interpretative inquiry. By the time of his death he had become an iconic intellectual within the pantheon of the ‘cultural turn’ that has dominated the humanities and human sciences. Whether he is revered or reviled, all those involved in cultural research have to be familiar with his work, just as all psychoanalytic thinkers must deal with Freud, all critical theory with Marx, all structuralism with Saussure. Our conference on Clifford Geertz and the Human Sciences provided an opportunity to evaluate this legacy. With an international and interdisciplinary panel of distinguished presenters it offered probably the first systematic and critical overview of his legacy as this has influenced thinking throughout the humanities and social sciences. The speakers are all appreciative but also mindful of the gaps, contradictions and unintended consequences of Geertz’s oeuvre. The result was a telling engagement, one that respected Geertz by trying to move forward. The conference grappled with the fundamental questions of theory, method, writing and interpretation that he so brilliantly and controversially reworked, opening up new avenues for scholarship into this century.
Link to Clifford Geertz and the Human Sciences Conference Program (PDF)
The Center for Cultural Sociology’s inaugural conference, ‘Culture in the World,’ brought the Center’s diaspora of Senior and Faculty Fellows to New Haven for four days of dialogue and debate at the forefront of research in the field.
Convened by the Center’s Executive Board and Junior Fellows, the conference featured six plenary lectures delivered by Senior Fellows, nine regular sessions featuring 20-minute papers by Faculty Fellows, and a day of graduate student papers.
Particular issues and themes included:
- the increasing relevance of culture for institutional research in sociology
- the relationship of cultural sociology to normative critique and political theories of democracy
and sessions focusing on:
- popular culture
- the sociology of art and music
- violence and trauma
- politics and collective identity
- culture and experience