Department of Sociology

Introduction to CIS 5.1.

The authors consider the role of the sacred in Italy from the Middle Ages to the present day, particularly in relation to religion (above all Catholicism) as well as to the currents of modern critical thought.

This paper discusses the Italian ethnographer Ernesto de Martino’s investigation of ritual crying in Southern Italy, bringing to the fore the role ethnology was called to play as a new twentieth-century discipline that emerged from the forced encounter between powerful “advanced” nations and societies “without history.”  Ethnology sought to analyze the impact of cultural norms on a world increasingly polarized between the inevitable march towards rational modernity and the appeal of a magical pre-modern time.  For de Martino, in particular, ethnological research on popular religiosity and ritual crying exposed the peculiarities of Italy’s uneven development in the post-war years and became a means through which to rethink the Italian South.

This paper explores the issue of the Italians’ relationship to democracy against the theoretical background of Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the modern public sphere. After introducing the basic tenets of Habermas’s theory of democracy as founded on public opinion, open to dialog and exercising reason, the paper examines the state of the Italian public sphere in the wake of the Berlusconi era. The paper summarizes several perspectives by prominent Italianists on the different aspects of the Italian public sphere and draws conclusions about the limits and potential of the Italians’ commitment to democracy.

Queer nightlife is receiving increasing recognition in a growing field of nightlife studies, yet its insights have been largely mined by humanists. In this introduction to a subfield-defining special issue, I blend arguments from the social sciences about “dirty work” with humanistic notions of “disidentification” as a survival strategy to amplify a sociological point of view. What theoretical opportunities arise from working on and against the conservative tendencies of the discipline, neither abandoning queer nightlife for something perceived as more legitimate nor refusing entirely to engage with other sociologists? A review of select multidisciplinary works distills three expressions of disidentification used by researchers to negotiate novel arguments. I describe these as conceptual renovations, deconstructive reframings, and epistemological affirmations. From this baseline, I classify special issue papers into additional clusters that articulate sociology-specific interventions that neither uncritically embrace nor strictly oppose normative standards but transform them from within, what I call reorientations, relational work, and regulated improvisations. These themes together contribute to a knowledge platform about queer nightlife that conveys both shared theoretical frameworks and disciplinary distinctions.

It is well established that women’s representation in scientific and technical fields decreases with societal affluence, but the mechanisms underlying this so-called paradox remain contested. This study leverages distinctive features of the Israeli educational system to identify social psychological and organizational mechanisms driving contextual variability in the gendering of physics and computing subjects. Using in-depth interviews and original surveys, we compare gender gaps in ninth graders’ attitudes and aspirations across two highly segregated yet centrally administered state school sectors: one serving the socioeconomically marginalized Arab Palestinian minority, and one serving the Jewish secular majority. Results reveal curricular affinities, discourses, and course-taking patterns that are differentially gendered across school sectors. While boys and girls in Arab Palestinian schools report more instrumentalist motivations and more positive attitudes toward mathematically intensive fields, students in Jewish schools engage in highly gendered, self-reflexive discourses that support gendered course-taking. Findings support arguments positing gender-specific effects of postmaterialist, individualistic value systems, and suggest that the cultural and organizational processes that generate larger gender gaps in more affluent countries may also play out within countries.

This article reviews two related approaches-conversation analysis (CA) and membership categorization analysis (MCA)-to sketch a systematic framework for exposing how categories and categorial phenomena are (re)produced in naturally occurring social interaction. In so doing, we argue that CA and MCA address recent concerns about psychological methods and approaches. After summarizing how categories are typically theorized and studied, we describe the main features of a CA approach to categories, including how this differs from conventional psychology. We review the core domains of research in CA and how categories can be studied systematically in relation to the basic machinery of talk and other conduct in interaction. We illustrate these domains through examples from different settings of recorded naturally occurring social interaction. After considering the applications that have arisen from CA and MCA, we conclude by drawing together the implications of this work for psychological science.

Is globalization still a proper descriptor? Does globalization also include satellites and space shuttles in outer space? Recent work widens the definition of globalization: ‘Globalization is the trend of greater worldwide connectivity of people over time and the awareness of this happening.’ This shift of emphasis to connectivity as the driving force and the key point, implies that globalization is just one of the many forms this takes. Important is not the form, which changes according to circumstances, but connectivity and what it aspires and achieves. In an era of comeback of geopolitics this may be an important course adjustment.

This study investigates variability across 31 European countries in the gender composition of engineering and computing (“tech”) occupations, and possible sociocultural drivers of this variability. As previously documented for other STEM domains and geographies, the largest tech gender gaps are in the most affluent societies of Europe (which are also most postmaterialist and gender-liberal culturally). Multilevel regression models explore key attitudinal and socioeconomic predictors of this gender segregation that have been identified through previous comparative research. Results show that men, but not women, who espouse postmaterialist values have higher odds of working in engineering or computing, and that the gender-specific effects of postmaterialist values account for a substantial share of cross-country variability. Findings are consistent with research suggesting a heightened salience of gender math stereotypes to career aspirations in societies that valorize individual self-expression and “doing what you love.”

In the wake of recent interventions to better connect the subfields of international migration and race and ethnicity through a sociology of racialized immigration, we push this further by arguing for the necessity of a global Blackness perspective on global migration. Such a focus does not just reflect the role of race in the dynamics of migration, and vice versa, but more importantly shifts assumptions about this relationship. So, it is not enough to say that race matters in migration but rather that blackness and Black lives matter in how migration unfolds. Using global blackness as a starting point in our analyses of migration reveals a clearer and closer entanglement of race, racism, colonialism, and migration. We argue that global Blackness structures notions of who migrates and under what conditions, as well as our ideas regarding migrants and their descendants and use the examples of New York City, Paris, and France as paradigmatic sites for understanding this relationship.