News Archive
Dean Mario Small's paper critiquing scholars' over-reliance on Chicago as a case for generating a theory of 'the ghetto,' is discussed in Chicago Magazine's 312 blog.
Professor Michal Engelman's work on intergenerational relationships and senior migration, recently published in the journal Research on Aging, is featured in the New York Times New Old Age Blog.
PhD student Gordon Douglas is working with the curatorial team for "Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good," the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice International Architecture Biennale, for which he also co-edited the exhibition catalog. The installation, which explores the movement toward grassroots, informal, and unauthorized urban design interventions in cities around the world, opened in Venice last week and was awarded a rare Special Mention by judges.
Phd student Chris Takacs' research on how social relationships with peers and professors shape college students' trajectories is highlighted on the University homepage. Also featured is an undergraduate student's personal account of the impact Professor Abbott and other professors had on her life at the University and and beyond.
Phd student David Schalliol's work is featured in an Atlantic Cities series on America's rebuilding efforts. Schalliol and his collaborator are studying creative revitalization efforts in urban areas across the country, in over 30 cities.
Professor Karin Knorr Cetina has been invited to join the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, School of Social Science, as an Invited Visitor during the academic year 2012-13. Professor Knorr Cetina is also co-organizing and introducing (with Alan Kolata) a Conference on "Competition," at the University of Chicago Center in Paris, May 31-June 1, 2012.
Professor Mario Small has been appointed Dean of the Social Sciences Division. President Robert J. Zimmer and Provost Thomas F. Rosenbaum announced that in appointing Prof. Small, they recognized him as a scholar and leader who would work with faculty to define the division's intellectual and educational direction, while building support for the division.
Professor Donald Levine's innovative course on African Civilizations is featured in the UChicago News.
Professor Linda Waite is a featured contributor to a New York Times series: "Are 'Family Values' Outdated?"
A new University of Chicago workshop, the Computational Social Science Workshop, provides a forum for scholars using a wide array of computational and analytical methods in the social sciences to discuss current research and methods.
PhD student Chris Takacs' research on how motivation and majors among college students has been profiled in a recent article on the Chronicle of Higher Education.
University of Illinois at Chicago hosts the Chicago Ethnography Conference, at which several University of Chicago sociologists will present their work.
The University of Chicago Urban Network hosts a screening of Urbanized, a documentary depicting the world-wide trend of rapid urbanization with a focus on the design of cities. Sociology PhD candidate Gordon Douglas will participate on a panel of experts offering commentary on the film.
The American Journal of Sociology has issued a call for papers for an upcoming special issue, "Causal Thinking and Ethnographic Research." Click here for details.
Scott Washington will join the department next year as a University of Chicago's Provost Postdoctoral fellow.
Phd student and visual sociologist David Schalliol was recently featured as a panelist in a conversation about Art and Politics at the Victory Gardens Theater.
The Greater Good Science Center at University of California-Berkeley features Professor Mario Small's research on how childcare centers broker social capital for mothers.
The department of Sociology is pleased to welcome Forrest Stuart to our faculty next year from the University of California- Los Angeles. Stuart's research interests include urban sociology, crime and punishment, law and race. His recent work explores how new forms of policing and criminal justice techniques shape the daily lives of marginalized urban communities, and how these communities resist these efforts at social control.
PhD candidate Juhi Verma's research was featured in the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture's fall newsletter. Verma is a 2011 CSRPC Dissertation Fellow whose research focuses on how unlawful labor practices occur within regulated markets through multi-country migrant recruitment networks, and how temporary workers resist these work structures through court remediation.
Professor Kristen Schilt's recent book, Just One of the Guys? Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender Inequality (Chicago 2010), is featured in Gender News, a publication of Stanford University's Clayman Institute for Gender Research.
Phd student and visual sociologist David Schalliol was recently featured as a panelist in a conversation about Art and Politics at the Victory Gardens Theater.
The Greater Good Science Center at University of California-Berkeley features Professor Mario Small's research on how childcare centers broker social capital for mothers.
The department of Sociology is pleased to welcome Forrest Stuart to our faculty next year from the University of California- Los Angeles. Stuart's research interests include urban sociology, crime and punishment, law and race. His recent work explores how new forms of policing and criminal justice techniques shape the daily lives of marginalized urban communities, and how these communities resist these efforts at social control.
PhD candidate Juhi Verma's research was featured in the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture's fall newsletter. Verma is a 2011 CSRPC Dissertation Fellow whose research focuses on how unlawful labor practices occur within regulated markets through multi-country migrant recruitment networks, and how temporary workers resist these work structures through court remediation.
Professor Kristen Schilt's recent book, Just One of the Guys? Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender Inequality (Chicago 2010), is featured in Gender News, a publication of Stanford University's Clayman Institute for Gender Research.
Michal Engelman and Kathleen Cagney recently joined the faculty. Michal is a demographer and gerontologist who focuses on the dynamics of population aging and the determinants of longevity and well being at older ages. She joins us from Johns Hopkins University. Kathleen is a demographer whose research includes the effects of neighborhoods on health, and racial and ethnic differences in access to health care/long-term care. She is also a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and joins us, most recently, from the Department of Health Studies at the University of Chicago.
The department of Sociology and the Committee on Social Thought invited Robert Bellah, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California-Berkeley, to deliver a public lecture about his recently published book, Religion in Human Evolution.
Phd student David Schalliol's photography, focusing on Chicago residential and commercial buildings, multistories and one flats with no neighboring structures, was recently featured in the University of Chicago alumni magazine. Schalliol will exhibit hisIsolated Buildings series at the Steenbock Gallery in Madison, Wisconsin, through April 8 and at the Hyde Park Art Center this fall.
The Chicago Sun-Times reports on Ed Laumann's work on the impact of network position on middle-aged and older men's erectile dysfunction. Laumann and co-author Benjamin Cornwell find that the rate of erectile dysfunction when men's wives were closer to a friend than the men were was comparable to those with prostate issues. Results from the study, "Network Position and Sexual Dysfunction: Implications of Partner Betweenness for Men," are forthcoming in the American Journal of Sociology.
Professor Andrew Abbott was awarded a "Docteur Honoris Causa" from L'Universite De Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, based on his important contributions to the improvement of sociological knowledge.
Professor Mario Small and a group of other social scientists have created the University of Chicago Urban Network, the goal of which is to spur innovation in the study of urban processes and interdisciplinary discourse in urban research, theory and policy. One feature of the new network is a comprehensive web portal that provides researchers, practitioners, journalists, and the general public access to the latest research and resources on urban social science. One new feature of the portal is a current list of all workshop presentations related to urban issues anywhere in the University.
The Universite de Versailles Saint Quentin-en-Yvelines recently hosted a conference to recognize Professor Andrew Abbott's contributions to sociology and to examine those parts of his work that are less known in France. The organizers hoped to "extend and deepen the dialogue" between French sociologists and Prof. Abbott's work.
A report from the American Sociological Association, authored in part by Mario Small, demonstrates serious methodological flaws in the National Research Council's recent ranking of doctoral programs.
The New York Times featured Phd candidate Elizabeth Terrien's work on family perceptions of their pet dogs. Terrien conducted 90 in-depth interviews with dog-owners in Los Angeles, and found that families in affluent neighborhoods characterized their pets as companions or friends, whereas in lower income neighborhoods with large immigrant populations pets were more often conceived as "protectors." Terrien also observed clear differences between rural and urban conceptions of pets.
The National Science Foundation and other news outlets feature an article in Science by James Evans and sociology postdoc Jacob Foster about how the growth of electronic publication makes it possible to harvest vast quantities of knowledge about knowledge or "metaknowledge." This includes the influence of social context, beliefs, research tools and strategies on regularities in science content, and can be used to direct the next generation of scientific investigation.
The Chicago Sun Times reports that University of Chicago sociology alumnus Andrew Papachristos recently worked with the Chicago Police Department using social network analysis to identify key gang members who might be candidates for a novel crime reduction plan. Papachristos, a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at Harvard University and an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has contributed to similar efforts in high-crime areas in Cincinnati and Boston, which have seen a sharp decrease in murders.
The Chicago Maroon interviewed Andrew Abbott about how he came to sociology as a discipline, his unique style of teaching, and his thoughts on what makes the University of Chicago unique.
Science Careers featured and commented on Cheol-Sung Lee's article "Incubating Innovation or Cultivating Corruption?: The Developmental State and the Life Sciences in Asia," in which he and Andrew Schrank explored the organizational bases of corruption in science. In China and Korea, where professors are given substantial state resources and a strict hierarchy structures lab relations, students are given neither the information nor the opportunity to call researchers on fraudulent claims.
In February 2011, the University of Chicago Press published George Simmel’s final work Lebensanschauung (The View of Life), co-translated from German by former sociology graduate student John Andrews andDonald N. Levine, and with an introduction by Levine and Committee on Social Thought alumnus Dan Silver. Composed in the years before his death, The View of Life was, according to Simmel, his “testament,” and is considered by some scholars to be the key to understanding his work.
Mario Small co-edited a special issue of Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, featuring new research on the relations between culture and poverty. After years of the topic being considered taboo, a resurgence of work has recently emerged. This work is featured in Le Vie des idées, the New York Times and National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation."
Miller-McCune discussed the implications of Mario Small and Anjanette Chan Tack’s in-depth interview study with pre-teen students and their parents at two high-poverty elementary schools in Chicago. The study examined the impact of student body turnover on friendships among children.
