Yale’s Center for Cultural Sociology (CCS) provides a focus for meaning-centered analysis in the social science tradition. The CCS incorporates scholars from diverse backgrounds, sharing an interest in understanding how culture informs and structures social life and its problems. Read more »
Jeffrey C. Alexander has been awarded The Foundation Mattei Dogan Prize in Sociology by the International Sociological Association. The prize is awarded every four years in recognition of “lifetime accomplishments” to “a scholar of very high standing in the profession and of outstanding international reputation.” Previous recipients of the award were Neil Smelser (2002) and Alain Touraine (2006). The $5000 prize will be presented at the World Congress of Sociology in Gothenberg, Sweden, in July 2010, where “the laureate will present a prize lecture at the special presidential prize-giving session.”
Cultural Sociology at the Crossroads
Friday, May 8th & Saturday, May 9th, 2009
The 2009 CCS Spring Conference includes contributions from CCS Junior Fellows, Visiting Fellows, Pre-Doctoral Fellows and Post-Doctoral Fellows. We are pleased to welcome as participants Faculty Fellow Ron Jacobs and eight of his students from the Sociology Department at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Read more »
The Making of Global Adoption: Cultural Politics, Economics, and Ethics
Children’s rights and trafficking issues are central to the contemporary debate on international adoption. Whereas advocates of international adoption see the phenomenon as providing orphaned children with a loving home and family, opponents argue that contemporary practices of global adoption primarily caters to family-making demands of western childless couples at the expense of children and possible birthparents in developing worlds. Moreover, they assert that it also enhances the growth of a baby market, which is often accompanied by systematic child trafficking. This latter ethical stance seems to be acknowledged and advocated in international conventions on inter-country adoption. Nevertheless, despite these dissuading institutional measures, “adoption markets” in western nations are evolving and expanding.
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Carmina burana and Nazi Ritual
As one of the most continuingly popular works from the past century, Carmina burana poses the question, can music be fascist—or did its ideological function reside only in the experiences of its original reception, and the critical language that both shaped and recorded those experiences? This paper will draw on a vast archive of early reviews, dating from 1937 to 1944 to develop categories of experience that can be—or even explicitly were, in some cases—associated with Nazi ideology and culture. Read more »
That’s Not Fair! Stability and Coherence as Cultural Practice
This paper compares the notion of fairness and stability in John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1972) with Ann Swidler’s notion of the cultural ‘tool-kit’ in her famous article “Culture as Action: Symbols and Strategies” (1986) which is a key-text of the so-called ‘practice turn’ in sociology. Read more »
Epidemics and Rumors: Exploring the Representation of Drink-spiking in the British Media and its Relationship to Belief
This paper explores the representation of drug-facilitated sexual assault (DFSA) in the British media, and particularly the use of rumour and the metaphor of the epidemic. A central aim is to consider the relationship between media reporting and belief in routine DFSA, not - to be clear - to make an argument for media effects, but because this case study allows us to consider how the structure, tone, and style of reporting might interact with belief. Read more »
What is Social Memory Studies: Area, Paradigm, Field, or Fad?
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