Affiliated Centers

Yale-Fudan Center for Research in Cultural Sociology

The mission of the Center shall be to develop the field of cultural sociology in the Chinese social sciences and to provide opportunities for scholars in the American academy to better understand cultural analyses of Chinese society originating from the Chinese academy.

These programs and activities may include:

• Conducting collaborative research
• Holding joint lectures and symposia
• Exchanging academic information and materials
• Visits of faculty, students, researchers and administrative staff to the other Party’s facilities for collaborative activities

The initial Program Directors will be  Professors Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith at Yale University and Professors Zhou Yi and Anning Hu at Fudan University.

The Brno Center for Cultural Sociology

The Brno Center for Cultural Sociology is not an organization. It serves as a centrifocal point for intellectual and academic activities that respect the two general premises on which the Center is based (see below). It is here to highlight, inspire, and support such activities among interested students, scholars and beyond. We do it for pleasure, we take sociology seriously, and we don’t care about impact factors.

CULTURAL IS REAL: We take social world as a realm of meaning, and the social actor as homo interpretans. Meaning is the major driving and organizing force in human conduct and social relationships. It orients people in their world, it provides them with the will to act or abstain from acting, it shapes their innermost feelings and makes sense of them. Meaning is a social fact of the strongest caliber.

CRITICAL IS PRACTICAL: For us, cultural sociology is an exercise in critical thought. It thinks with, through, and for social actors, but not instead of them. At its best, cultural sociology provides information for critical understanding and self-understanding to those who are open to it. It is practical as it respects practicality of individual actors, not just governments and other institutions. It is not meant to provide intellectual ammunition for ideological struggles. Partisan thinking is antithetical to critical thought.

Center for the Cultural Sociology of Migration

The Center for the Cultural Sociology of Migration, a part of the Department of Sociology at Masaryk University in Brno, Czechia, was established in 2017. The Center involves PhD and Master’s students, and academic staff, who meet regularly and publish their work in international, peer-reviewed journals. Our specific focus is to look at migration and mobility processes from cultural sociological perspectives. Despite the fact that culture is implicated in these processes, migration studies and cultural sociology rarely come into conversation with one another. The Center is committed to promoting such dialogue by supporting theoretical innovation and empirical research that fosters a cultural sociology of migration and its impact on contemporary societies. The goal is to encourage the use of the analytical tools of cultural sociological analysis, such as codes, discourses, boundaries, practices and repertoires, to name a few, which help lead to a more nuanced understanding of contemporary migration and its impacts.  CCS Faculty Fellow Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky is the Director.

Action, Culture, Meaning, and Experience (ACME) Research Unit

The research unit Action, Culture, Meaning, and Experience (ACME) is based in the Department of Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trento, Italy. It promotes research, debate, and teaching on the cultural dimension of social life. It is a site where participants may explore together meaning-making processes, action in interaction, and the production, consumption, and communication of cultural artifacts. ACME includes sociologists as well as anthropologists, historians, and media people. It promotes and coordinates theoretical and empirical research activities to study interactions, discourses, narratives, and written, visual, and multimedia texts. CCS Faculty Fellows Andrea Cossu, Martina Cvajner, and Giuseppe Sciortino are among the founders. Contact:  acme.soc@unitn.it. 

Bar Ilan Center for Cultural Sociology

The Center for Cultural Sociology at Bar Ilan University, Israel, is dedicated to integrating cultural theory with grounded empirical research. Because cultural phenomena cannot be divorced from the patterning of social organization, our goal is to develop concepts and frameworks that illuminate how institutional practices on the meso level interact with individual and collective experience on the micro and macro levels. The Bar Ilan center is a leading hub in cultural sociology within Israeli academic landscape. It is administered jointly by the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Interdisciplinary Program for Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies and co-directed by CCS fellows Danny Kaplan, Ilana F. Silber and Hizky Shoham, as well as Ori Schwarz. Our researchers study a range of topics, among them: social and cultural theory, civil society, national solidarity and politics of friendship, media and consumption studies, digital culture, sociology of taste, judgment and evaluation, gift and philanthropy, sociology of emotions and the therapeutic discourse, religion and performance studies, organizational and market cultures.

Moscow Centre for Cultural Sociology

The HSE Moscow Centre for Cultural Sociology carries out theoretical and empirical investigations of culture and its paramount role within contemporary societies. MCCS’s primary focus includes social inequalities and the various ways in which culture informs individuals’ identities, perceptions, rationales, actions, preferences, aspirations and decision-making patterns. This involves particular attention paid to such issues as the emotional dimension of culture, metaphors, narratives, temporality and their role in social life. This leads us towards looking into such seemingly unrelated, but in fact eminently strategic, issues as the sacred, mystery, religion, the body, medicalization and sport, among others. These and others empirical inquiries are heavily driven by theoretical concerns present in the most vibrant contemporary debates, such as those around culture and cognition, structured versus fragmented character of culture, prospects of formal methods of cultural analysis, and others. By combining theoretical and empirical studies, and qualitative and quantitative methods, MCCS seeks to advance intra- and inter-disciplinary dialogue, while providing an ecosystem for the development of state-of-the-art cultural sociology and inequality studies. CCS faculty fellow Dmitry Kurakin is the head of the Centre. 

CCS North: Cultural Sociology Discussion Group

Cultural sociology in Scandinavia has thrived in last years, with many active scholars meeting directly or indirectly through the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. We are now an organic group with face-to-face meetings a few times a year and a weekly seminar on Slack, where we exchange texts and ideas and give each other cultural sociological inspiration. The group includes sociologists as well as researchers from pedagogy, political science, religious studies, and communications backgrounds; we share an interest in a perspective that treats culture as an independent variable and a focus on empirical material from diverse national contexts in comparative perspective. We call ourselves CCS North in reference both to our connection to the CCS at Yale and our northern European base. For more information, contact CCS Fellows Alison Gerber  or Anna Lund .