Sociology for Dark Times

Over the last few months, students on college campuses all over the world have been protesting the mass slaughter in Gaza. I was one of the majority of faculty at UMass Amherst who supported our students' encampment, and then opposed our administration's violent assault on it. In this episode I talk with Amy Binder, whose book with Jeffrey Kidder, The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right Are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today (2022) is one of the few analyses of student activism on U.S. college campuses after 2016. Their study is based in flagship state schools like mine, and is unusual in its inclusion of student activists across the political spectrum. This conversation was a much needed opportunity to reflect on the events of last year.Amy Binder is a Stavros Niarchos Agora Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. She is Interim Director of the SNF Agora Institute, founded in 2017 to diagnose the problems facing liberal democracies, encourage dialogue and participation through public events, and to offer courses in the study of democracy. Before her recent move to Johns Hopkins, Amy was on the sociology faculty at the University of California San Diego.Please join me at the invited thematic session at ASA in Montreal next week, Sociology for Hope. The panelists represent a range of substantive interests and career stages, from graduate student to emeritus faculty. 

A few weeks ago, Hamas murdered hundreds of unarmed people in Israel, including many children and elderly. The sadism and depravity of this killing spree was remarkable even by the standards of the long history of violence against Jews. Israel has responded with characteristic savagery, killing more than 10,000 Palestinians, including thousands of children. This orgy of collective punishment has also reduced much of Gaza to rubble and dust.My conversation with Stellan Vinthagen offers one sociological perspective on the war based on his work on resistance and social movements. We also reflect on the origins and limits of nation states generally. Stellan Vinthagen is the Inaugural Endowed Chair in the Study of Nonviolent Direct Action and Civil Resistance, and Director of the Resistance Studies Initiative at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is also my colleague in the Sociology department at UMass Amherst. His resume is an unusual mix of scholarship and activism: he has written or edited eight books--most recently, Constructive Resistance--and numerous articles, and was an organizer of the Swedish contingent of the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza in 2010.The views we express here are ours alone.Feel free to write to me at sangupta@umass.edu. 

Our conversation previews a few themes from Prudence's presidential address at the ASA annual meeting in Philadelphia this weekend. Prudence identifies key deficiencies of liberal democracies like the U.S. that have allowed the social and political regression we're witnessing now. She has some pointed suggestions for what we sociologists should be doing in this regressive moment. Specifically, we discuss the case of affirmative action in the U.S.  Prudence Carter is the Sarah and Joseph Jr. Dowling Professor of Sociology at Brown University. Before that, she was Dean of the Graduate School of Education at Berkeley. Her research focuses on academic inequalities based on race, ethnicity, class, and gender in the United States and elsewhere. Her books include the award-winning Keepin' It Real: School Success beyond Black and White (2005), and Stubborn Roots: Race, Culture, and Inequality in U.S. & South African Schools. Prudence is my first guest to highlight the importance of 'relational' factors and inequalities. I also really appreciated her urging us to do interdisciplinary work. As Prudence has learned first hand, academia does not make this easy for us, and even penalizes us for doing it, but we need to do it anyway. Like Joya Misra, the next president of ASA, Prudence also urges us to communicate directly with those who make things happen in the real world. Like Joya, she highlights our undergraduate students as agents of change. https://www.brown.edu/academics/sociology/people/prudence-carter

Is organized labor in the U.S. making a comeback? Over the last few years, unionization efforts have proliferated across the service sector, in Amazon, Trader Joe's, Starbucks, just to name a few. The movie and TV industry is facing rare, simultaneous strikes by writers and actors. By early August, more than 300,000 UPS workers may be on strike, which would be the largest private sector strike in the US in several decades. My guest this month is Eric Blanc, assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers University. Eric studies strikes, new workplace organizing, digital labor activism, and working-class politics. He is also a longtime labor activist, currently serving as organizer trainer for the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, a collaboration of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and United Electrical Workers of America. Full disclosure: I am also a member of the DSA. Eric is author of, among other books, Red State Revolt: The Teachers' Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics (Verso 2019). His writings have appeared in journals such as Politics & Society, and also in The Nation, The Guardian, and Jacobin.Following my conversation with Nadia Kim last month about age and optimism, I wanted to talk to an early-career sociologist. Eric was recently a graduate student in Sociology at NYU, making him my youngest guest so far. I started out as usual by asking Eric for his take on whether we're living through especially dark times. Like Anna Branch in May, Eric takes the long view, even with regard to climate change.Given the current weather all over the world, I find Eric's optimism about climate change heartening, even as I am unable to share it fully. The wave of labor activism and the possibility of a large strike at UPS in a few weeks is indeed energizing. Eric's assertion of the need for sociologists to work with, and for, activist organizations echoes Nadia Kim's call last month. Our discussion of the larger political implications of labor activism for democracy in the U.S. was especially illuminating for me; it echoes my conversation with Cedric De Leon of the UMass Labor Center in February. Join me in August for a conversation with Prudence Carter, outgoing president of the American Sociological Association. Hope you have a good summer till then!https://ericblanc.orghttps://laborpolitics.substack.com/

Within the next week or so, the US Supreme Court may end affirmative action as we know it. The path to this began in 1997, when the University of Michigan was sued for its affirmative action programs. My guest this month is Nadia Kim, who like me was a sociology graduate student in Michigan at the time of those lawsuits. We were both organizers for Academics for Affirmative Action and Social Justice, a group doing activism and education in our community in support of affirmative action. Even as affirmative action may end, however, movements like Black Lives Matter have dramatically raised the overall consciousness about the need for racial justice. We discuss these trends, and what they imply for the kinds of research sociologists can do. Nadia Kim will soon be Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University. She has studied Korean/Asian Americans and South Koreans, race and nativist racism in Los Angeles and environmental (in)justice, focusing on the intersections of race, gender, class, and citizenship. Her latest single-authored book is Refusing Death: Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in LA (Stanford University Press). Proceeds from the sale of this book will go directly to the organizations she studied. http://nadiakimacademic.net

This month I spoke with Anna Branch, sociologist and senior Vice President of equity at Rutgers University. Of all the sociologists I've talked with so far, Anna was the first to question my starting point that these are especially dark times. She asked, dark compared to when, and for whom? We discussed this in the context of Anna and Catherine Hanley's new book Work in Black and White: Striving for the American Dream, and also the looming rollback of affirmative action by the US Supreme Court later this summer. We also talked about the possibilities for solidarity between black and white workers in the U.S.https://annabranchphd.com/about/

For this episode I talked with Leslie McCall of the City University of New York. Leslie wonders if we should be asking different kinds of research questions, focusing on the possibilities for solidarity among the majority of people in the U.S. She's particularly critical of how we, as social scientists, frame our research about political polarization. Instead of focusing so intensely on divisions among people, she argues, we should be studying how the ultra wealthy and powerful are able to thwart the will of the majority in reducing economic inequality, for example.Leslie McCall is Associate Director of the Stone Center, and Presidential Professor of Sociology and Political Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She studies public opinion about inequality, trends in earnings and income inequality; and patterns of intersectional inequality. You can find more information about Leslie's work in the show notes.https://stonecenter.gc.cuny.edu/people/mccall-leslie/https://stonecenter.gc.cuny.edu/leslie-mccall-the-multidimensional-politics-of-inequality-lse-event/https://stonecenter.gc.cuny.edu/panel-building-political-alliances-across-race-and-class/

Everything all at once: Wars. Pandemics. Climate change. Neoliberalism. Authoritarianism. White supremacy...I ask my fellow sociologists the following questions: How can we, as sociologists, intervene in this moment, individually or collectively? How has their work changed over the last few years in response to the times? What are their sources of hope for change?Cedric de Leon tells us, among other things, about Du Bois as an exemplary public sociologist and the under recognized role of Black activists in the U.S. labor movement. Cedric calls for a “new eclectic mass movement” for economic democracy with labor playing a prominent role. Cedric also discusses the complicity of sociology in the development of neoliberalism.Cedric de Leon's labor organizing experience includes the Connecticut School Bus Drivers Alliance, the United Farm Workers in California, and the American Federation of Teachers at the University of Michigan. Most recently, he was the first person of color to direct the UMass Labor Center. Cedric's research focuses on labor, race, and party politics in the United States, India, and Turkey. https://www.umass.edu/lrrc/faculty/cedric-de-leon"The case for an eclectic mass movement," New Labor Forum 2022

Everything all at once: Wars. Pandemics. Climate change. Neoliberalism. Authoritarianism. White supremacy...I ask my fellow sociologists the following questions: How can we, as sociologists, intervene in this moment, individually or collectively? How has their work changed over the last few years in response to the times? What are their sources of hope for change?My inaugural guest is Joya Misra, President-Elect of the American Sociological Association. We discuss what sociologists can or should do now, the history of the discipline, of ASA, possibilities for public sociology, and for child care policy in the U.S.Joya is Provost Professor and the Roy J. Zuckerberg Endowed Leadership Chair at UMass-Amherst, and a Professor in both Sociology and the School of Public Policy. Joya's work focuses on multiple dimensions of social inequality, including by gender and parenthood status. She considers how policies can reinforce or reduce inequality in societies and workplaces. https://blogs.umass.edu/misra/https://www.umass.edu/sociology/users/misra