SOJC Research Seminar (SRS) Series

Winter 2018

Allen 307, Noon-1pm

02/14 (WED) Michael Dreiling (Professor, Department of Sociology at UO): “Networks of Power, Networks of Resistance”

Professor Dreiling introduces some sociological principles of social network analysis (SNA) and then recaps several network analyses and visualizations based on his empirical research. This work elucidates network concepts of power, influence and subgroup cohesion. Employing SNA tools alongside a power structure approach to socio-political dynamics – as inspired by Mills and Domhoff – we can generate insights and test theories. SNA can be a powerful complement to a multi-method research program. Professor Dreiling’s research applies these tools to study wide-ranging forms of collective action, from social movements rooted in civil society to elite institutions and corporate dominance of policy making in the US and Japan.

Professor Eileen Otis will be giving a talk on February 28th, 2018 at 4-5PM in EMU’s Miller Room as part of the Winter 2018 UO Labor Research Colloquium speaker series, sponsored by the Labor Education & Research Center (LERC).The talk titled “Walmart in China: How are Chinese workers Confronting the World’s Largest Company?”  explores how workers in China have confronted the world’s biggest employer, and how they have challenged, accommodated or reshaped Wal-Mart’s labor practices.

Graduate student Lola Loustaunau will present her work on April 18th, 2018 at 4 – 5pm at EMU’s Miller Room as part of the Winter 2018 UO Labor Research Colloquium speaker series, sponsored by the Labor Education & Research Center (LERC). The talk is titled, “Organizing multiethnic, multilingual workers with insecure legal status: challenges and lessons from an intensive campaign in the Portland food industry.”

We are excited to announce next week’s colloquium featuring a team of our departments fantastic researchers, Camila Alvarez, Lola Loustaunau, Larissa Petrucci and Ellen Scott. Their presentation is titled “Impossible Choices: How Workers Manage Unpredictable Scheduling Practices.” We hope to see you there on November 13^th, 2017 in PLC 714 at 12pm.

Professor Kemi Balogun is one of the many featured speakers at the Islamic Feminism Symposium sponsored by the Middle East and North Africa Studies program happening Friday, October 27th 2017. This all-day event takes place in Gerlinger 302 on the University of Oregon campus.

This symposium brings together scholars from multidisciplinary perspectives to explore the histories and contemporary debates on the themes of Islamic feminism and their application in the areas of law, democracy, globalization, and writing. Case studies of the women’s mosque movement explores women’s spiritual leadership and its role in the production and transmission of knowledge. The symposium highlights the contributions of Muslim women’s activism and examines and challenges popular representations of women and Islam.

Islamic Feminism Symposium Poster

Motivational Frame Disputes and Discursive Narratives Surrounding Hydraulic Fracking in the Haynesville Shale

Anthony E. Ladd
Professor of Sociology/The Environment Program
Loyola University New Orleans

June 5, 2015
12-1 PM
714 PLC

Abstract:
Environmental sociologists and social movement scholars have long utilized frame analysis concepts and similar analytic tools to examine how competing groups socially construct discursive interpretations of the environmental hazards, issues, and conflicts in their community (e.g. Brulle and Benford 2012; Capek 1993; Grey 2003, Krogman 1996; Ladd 2011; Shriver and Peaden 2009; Vincent and Shriver 2009). Typically, environmental frame disputes entail contrasting diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational narratives regarding what citizens view as the problems at hand, what solutions they propose to address such problems, and how these beliefs provide a motivation or rationale for adherents to take action on the issues driving the controversy (Benford 1993; Benford and Snow 2000). While the diagnostic and prognostic components of the larger frame dispute over natural gas fracking have been recently analyzed (see Ladd 2014), the motivational frames and discursive narratives that provide opposing rationales for the conflict have not received similar attention. In this presentation, based on a chapter from my forthcoming edited book (Fractured Communities: Risk, Impacts, and Protest Against Hydraulic Fracking in U.S. Shale Regions), I draw on sociological literature, archival sources, discursive documents, participant observation, and in-depth interview data from stakeholder groups in the region to provide a qualitative analysis of the motivational frame disputes surrounding natural gas development and hydraulic fracturing in the Haynesville Shale region of Louisiana. I conclude with some observations about their implications for future mobilization efforts surrounding oil and gas fracking.

Bio:
Anthony E. Ladd is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and The Environment Program and a former chair of the Department of Sociology and the Environmental Studies Program at Loyola University New Orleans. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. in sociology from the University of Tennessee and his B.S. in sociology from Ball State University. He has taught at the University of North Georgia, the University of Tennessee, and Carson-Newman College, and has served as a Visiting Professor at Duke University, Oregon State University, and Mississippi State University. He has also given invited research lectures on such campuses as the University of Oregon, Oklahoma State University, Villanova University, the University of South Florida, the University of Indianapolis, West Virginia Tech, and is a former president of the Association for Humanist Sociology (AHS). Dr. Ladd’s major area of research centers on the impacts of energy-driven environmental controversies and technological disasters on communities. He is the author of the forthcoming edited volume, Fractured Communities: Risk, Impacts, and Protest Against Hydraulic Fracking in U.S. Shale Regions (2017, Rutgers University Press) and has published over 50 articles, chapters, and reviews in such venues as Sociological Inquiry, Social Currents, Sociological Spectrum, American Behavioral Scientist, Journal of Rural Social Sciences, Humanity and Society, Journal of Public Management and Social Policy, and Social Justice. His most recent published research analyzes the environmental frame disputes and differential impacts of natural gas fracking in the Haynesville and Tuscaloosa Shale regions of Louisiana, as well as the growing socio-environmental threats posed by our continued reliance on fossil fuels and unconventional energy development. He is currently serving on the advisory board for an NSF grant on wastewater induced seismicity in Colorado and Oklahoma, is a Co-PI on a study examining the social impacts of extreme energy production in the United Kingdom (UK), and is researching the growth of “Frackademia” and the influx of corporate oil and gas funding into higher education.

Jennifer Utrata
Department of Sociology
University of Puget Sound

Monday May 22
12:00 – 1:00 pm
714 PLC

Title: Rethinking Single Motherhood: Normalized Gender Crisis and Russia’s Quiet Revolution

Abstract: How might Russia be understood as an extreme case of the increased gender distrust and relationship fluidity shaping families worldwide? Both women and men in Russia observe that there are few real men, and note an entrenched “problem with men,” especially given the “scourge” of male drinking. This state of normalized gender crisis has important implications for Russia, shaping people’s experiences of the state, society, family life, and the transition to neoliberal market capitalism. However, it also has implications for our understanding of single motherhood and gender crisis elsewhere, including in the United States. Russia is a sensitizing case, one which challenges scholars to move beyond American exceptionalism in studies of families and gender relations. From growing numbers of single mothers and de facto single (but legally married) mothers, to overburdened grandmothers and men who share women’s disillusionment with men and the state, this talk discusses several aspects of Russia’s quiet revolution which challenge Western assumptions about single motherhood, poverty, families, and gender.

Bio: Jennifer Utrata is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Puget Sound. Her research focuses on how economic and social transformations shape gender and intimate relationships. Her book Women without Men: Single Mothers and Family Change in the New Russia (Cornell 2015) won the PSA’s Distinguished Scholarship Award (2017) and the ESS’s Mirra Komarovsky Distinguished Book Award (2016). She has also published in journals such as Gender & Society and Journal of Marriage and Family. Utrata’s current research focuses on how grandmothers’ unpaid care work shapes the transition to parenthood, parents’ responses to the child care crisis, and broader inequalities among families in the United States.

Tuesday, May 16
12:00 – 1:00 pm
714 PLC

Presenter:
Josh Gamson
Department of Sociology
University of San Francisco

Talk Title: “Extraordinary Kin: The Politics of Unconventional Family Creation Stories”

Abstract: In Modern Families, I try to apprehend larger changes in family structure and kinship by looking at it nontraditional family creation from the inside out. I recount the stories of how I and some other people I know created our unconventional families (single mother families; lesbian, gay, and trans families; multiparent queer families) through assisted reproduction and adoption, using them as a spot from which to view the norms, conventions, and institutions that regulate contemporary family making. In this talk, I focus on the politics of telling such family stories. I situate them within the larger context of myths about the One True Family, and within the main competing genres through which unconventional family origin stories are told, one celebratory and the other critical. I then tell pieces of those stories, to illustrate how family storytelling can reveal complex encounters with normative regimes, global inequalities, class inequalities, medical and legal institutions, and market transactions. I finish by considering both the micropolitics and macropolitics of telling family origin stories, especially where these stories might enter broader discussions of reproductive justice and freedom.

Bio: Joshua Gamson is Professor of Sociology at the University of San Francisco. He is the author of Claims to Fame:  Celebrity in Contemporary America (California, 1994); Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity (Chicago, 1998); The Fabulous Sylvester (Henry Holt/Picador, 2005), and Modern Families: Stories of Extraordinary Journeys to Kinship (New York University, 2015), along with numerous scholarly articles on social movements, sexualities, and contemporary culture. Among other honors, he’s received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Pegging and the Heterosexualization of Anal Sex: An Analysis of Savage Love advice

May 8, 2017
12-1 pm
714 PLC

Jade Aguilar
Associate Professor of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies
Willamette University

Abstract:
This presentation examines the act of  “pegging,” a term that American sex advice columnist Dan Savage and his readers coined to describe a woman performing anal sex on a man by penetrating the man’s anus with a strap-on dildo. Since 2001 when the term was coined, the act (and the term) have gained popularity in the United States, appearing regularly in the mass media. This talk analyzes the Savage Love columns that discuss pegging. Using a queer theory approach, I show how Savage and his readers discursively normalize deviant sexual behaviors to construct socially “appropriate” sexual acts, bodies, behaviors, and identities. Straight-identified peggers are benefitting from the gains that gays/lesbians/queers have made in opening norms and sexual culture, but at the same time are working to highlight their straight identity and the social privileges that come with it.

Bio:
Jade Aguilar is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Willamette University in Salem, OR. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado-Boulder. She studies and teaches courses in gender, sexuality, and family, in particular examining and challenging essentialist and biologically determinist perspectives. Her main areas of study include Intentional Communities, non-normative sexualities, and women in the construction trades.

Monday, May 1
12:00 – 1:00 pm
714 PLC

Presenter: Dan Jaffee
Department of Sociology
Portland State University

Talk Title: Who’s the Fairest of Them All?  Charting the Fractured Landscape of Fair Trade Certification in the U.S.

Abstract: A few years ago, U.S. consumers seeking fairly-traded food products could look for a single product label.  Today, shoppers are confronted by no fewer than four competing fair-trade seals, each backed by a separate third-party certification and based on differing standards.  This fracturing results from longstanding divisions within the U.S. fair trade movement over its relationship with large corporate food firms and the role of agribusiness plantations in fair trade.  This talk draws on content analyses of the standards behind the four main U.S. fair trade labels to explore three questions: (1) How specifically do these certifications differ, and what kinds of economic and labor relations are facilitated by each?; (2) How closely do the standards underlying these seals correspond to the foundational principles of the fair trade movement?; and (3) What does the fracturing of the U.S. fair-trade certification system signify about the dynamics of competition among nonstate standards?  It argues that the current fragmented certification landscape illuminates struggles among competing interest groups over which principles—and which labor and production forms—should be privileged under the banner of fair trade.

Bio: Dan Jaffee is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Portland State University. His research focuses on the effects of economic globalization and neoliberal policies on social and environmental conditions for rural communities, both in the global South (particularly Latin America) and the global North. This broad focus is reflected in his ongoing work on the international fair trade system and the commodification of public goods like drinking water. His research has appeared in his award-winning book, Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival (UC Press, updated edition in 2014) and other scholarly outlets, including Agriculture and Human Values; Organization & Environment; Rural Sociology; Sustainability; and Social Problems. Additional information about Dr. Jaffee’s work can be found here: https://www.pdx.edu/sociology/daniel-jaffee.