Speakers
Maeve Cooke is Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin, Ireland and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. Her current research interests centre on the relation between freedom and authority, with a specific focus on questions of democratic dissent and political violence. Her principal book publications are Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas’s Pragmatics (MIT Press, 1994) and Re-Presenting the Good Society (MIT Press, 2006). She is the author of many articles in the areas of social and political philosophy and has held visiting appointments at universities in the USA and Europe. She is on the editorial board of a number of scholarly journals.
Volker Heins is Permanent Fellow and Head of Research in the area of “Interculturality” at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) in Essen, Germany, as well as a member of the social science faculty at the University of Bochum. He is also Faculty Fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. His areas of teaching and research include moral struggles in world society, multiculturalism, human rights and democracy, the politics of collective memory, and the Frankfurt School and its aftermath. Relevant publications include: “A Fire That Doesn’t Burn? The Allied Bombing of Germany and the Cultural Politics of Trauma,” in Ron Eyerman, Jeffrey C. Alexander and Elizabeth B. Breese, eds., Narrating Trauma: On the Impact of Collective Suffering (Yale Cultural Sociology Series), Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2011 (with Andreas Langenohl); Der Skandal der Vielfalt: Geschichte und Konzepte des Multikulturalismus, Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 2013; “Recognition, Multiculturalism and the Allure of Separatism,” in Patrick Hayden and Kate Schick, eds., Recognition and Global Politics: Critical Encounters between State and World, Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2016.
Anne Kane received her PhD in Sociology from the University of California Los Angeles, and is currently Associate Professor at the University of Houston-Downtown. Her research is in the areas of cultural theory and analysis, historical sociology, and social movements, with particular focus on meaning construction, collective and national identity, and Ireland. Her publications include: Constructing Irish National Identity: Ritual and Discourse during the Land War, 1879-1882, 2011, Palgrave Macmillan; “Narratives of Nationalism: Constructing Irish National Identity during the Land War, 1879-1882.” National Identities (Vol. 2, 2000); and “Theorizing Meaning Construction in Social Movements: Symbolic Structures and Interpretation during the Irish Land War, 1879-1882.” Sociological Theory (Vol. 15, 1997).
Farhad Khosrokhavar received his PhD from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (director Alain Touraine). He is currently the director of the Cadis, founded by Alain Touraine, and Professor at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. He has written on the Iranian Revolution, Islam in France, radical Islam, the Arab Revolutions, and the philosophy of social sciences. He published some sixteen books in French and five in English (one of them a translation). His recent publications are: Radicalisation, Maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris, December 2014 (forthcoming translation in English and German); The New Arab Revolutions that Shook the World (Paradigm Publishers, 2012); Jihadist Ideology, The Anthropological Perspective (CIR, Aarhus University, 2011); and Inside Jihadism: Understanding Jihadi Movements Worldwide (Yale Cultural Sociology Series, Paradigm Publishers, 2009).
Karoline Andrea Ihlebæk is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Oslo, and affiliated with the Centre for the Study of Political Communication and the Centre for Research on Extremism. Her research interests include migration, public debates, media power, editorial control and gatekeeping.
María Luengo Cruz, Professor of sociology at the Universidad Carlos III en Madrid, holds a PhD in Information Sciences from the Universidad de Navarra. She has published numerous articles of social theory, cultural studies and journalism in prestigious journals such as Revista Española de Investigaciones Sociológicas (REIS), Zer, Anàlisi y Cinta de Moebio.
Stephen F. Ostertag earned his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Connecticut (2008) under the mentorship of Gaye Tuchman. He is currently an assistant professor of sociology at Tulane University in New Orleans. Broadly, his academic interests involve the study of self-motivation and collective actions as they relate to process of civil expansion and contraction. More directly, he examines the role of moralities and emotions in building voluntary social ties and relationships, and constructing and traversing boundaries. He engages these areas through a variety of avenues including the study of journalism/news, racism, and crime/deviance. He has published in a number of scholarly outlets. Some of his favorite publications include the following: “Becoming Pure: The Civil Sphere, Media Practices and Constructing Civil Purification,” published in Cultural Sociology (Vol. 8, Issue 1, 2014); “Expressions of right and wrong: The emergence of a cultural structure of journalism,” (2016) published in The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered: Democratic Culture, Professional Codes, Digital Future, edited by J. C. Alexander, E. Breese, and M. Luengo (Cambridge University Press); and “The battle over meaning: Digitally mediated processes of cultural trauma and repair in the wake of hurricane Katrina,” published with David G. Ortiz (New Mexico State University) in the American Journal of Cultural Sociology (Vol. 1, Issue 2, 2013).
Trevor Stack directs the Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law at the University of Aberdeen, where he is also Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies. He received his PhD (2002) from the University of Pennsylvania and is the author of Knowing History in Mexico: An Ethnography of Citizenship (University of New Mexico, 2012). Currently, he is completing a second monograph titled Citizen Personae, and he also the lead editor of Religion as a Category of Governance and Sovereignty (Brill, 2015).
Yasushi Xavier Tanaka-Gutiez is a Berlin-based, independent writer whose interests include capitalism, post-Fordism, ontology and revolution. He earned his BA at Goldsmiths College and PhD at Yale, both in sociology. He was formerly the co-founding editor of the arts and culture publication Shoppinghour Magazine (2008-14).
Carlo Tognato is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Social Studies at the National University of Colombia, Bogotá. He is also a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. For over a decade he has worked on cultural economic sociology. More recently his research has concentrated on the topic of civil reconstruction in postconflict. Recent publications include a book on the influence of culture in central banking, Central Bank Independence: Cultural Codes and Symbolic Performance (Palgrave-Macmillan, New York, 2012), and an edited volume on the influence of culture in urban policy, Cultural Agency Reloaded: The Legacy of Antanas Mockus (The Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard University, 2015).
Christine Unrau is is currently completing her PhD thesis at the department of Political Science of the University of Cologne. She is a Researcher at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. Her research interests include globalization, humanitarianism, political emotions and transcultural political thought. Her recent publications are Humanitarianism and Challenges of Cooperation, co-edited with V. M. Heins and K. Koddenbrock (Routledge, 2016); “Introduction: Cultures of Humanitarianism, Old and New,” in Humanitarianism and Challenges of Cooperation, edited by V. M. Heins and K. Koddenbrock (Routledge, 2016); and “Imitation, Abgrenzung und Interkulturalität. Zur Frage der Emanzipation vom Westen im politischen Denken Lateinamerikas“ (Imitation, Dissociation and Interculturality. Emancipation from the West in Latin American Political Thought), in Einführung in die Transkulturelle Politische Theorie (Introduction to Transcultural Political Theory), edited by S. Schubert, S. de la Rosa und H. Zapf (Springer, 2015).
Discussants
Jeffrey Alexander is Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at Yale University and the founder and co-director of Yale’s Center for Cultural Sociology. Among his recent writings are The Dark Side of Modernity (2013), Obama Power (with N. Jaworsky, 2014), and The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered: Economy, Technology, Culture (ed. with E. Breese and M. Luengo, 2016).
Liv Egholm is Associate Professor of Politics at the Copenhagen Business School. Her books include Philosophy of Science: Perspectives on Organisations and Society (2014). Her current research aims to map philanthropic associations influencing (and being influenced by) the continual conceptualization of philanthropy and welfare from the middle of the 19th century until the present day contributing to a fuller and more elaborated understanding of the role played by philanthropic organizations at the crossroads of state, market and civil society.
Peter Kivisto received his PhD from the New School for Social Research in 1982. He is currently the Richard A. Swanson Professor of Social Thought at Augustana College and Visiting Professor and Research Fellow at the University of Trento. He is also Head of the Research Laboratory on Transnationalism and Migration Processes at St. Petersburg State University. His research focuses on immigration, social integration, and civil society. His publications also include numerous works in the sociology of religion and on citizenship. His most recent books include National Identity in an Age of Migration (Routledge, forthcoming), Solidarity, Justice, and Incorporation: Thinking through The Civil Sphere (edited with Giuseppe Sciortino, Oxford University Press, 2015) and Religion and Immigration: Migrant Faiths in North America and Western Europe (Polity Press, 2014).