2021-2022 Archive
For the 2021-2022 academic year, the department will focus on the following types of virtual gatherings: those in which we share our own research and brown-bag professionalization workshops for graduate students. We also continue our Faculty Dialogues Series and Sociology Mixtapes sessions, featuring members of the UCSC sociology and campus community. We share our interests with a focus on our major influences, classic works, collaborations, off-the-beaten path contributions, and works in progress. For each of these Mixtapes themes, we will also hear about a matching track of music (which is part of an evolving playlist on YouTube and Spotify) to match our discussions. During each Mixtape, we reflect together and continue to build a soundtrack of inspiring artists, unforgettable tunes, deep cuts, songs made all the better by featured artists, and new work.
Sociology Mixtapes Volume 03: Juan Pedroza
Thursday, October 21, 2021
Time: 12:00 - 1:15pm
This Sociology Mixtapes session features Assistant Professor of Sociology Juan Pedroza.
Juan Pedroza is an Assistant Professor of sociology at UCSC studying the changing landscape of immigration in the United States. Over the past decade, Pedroza has examined the vast inequalities of immigrants' access to justice, the social safety net, poverty, and segregation. Pedroza's research examines how and where deportation and enforcement initiatives exacerbate these inequalities and leave imprints in our local communities.
Graduate Student Professionalization Workshop: Practicing Academic Job Talks
Friday, October 29, 2021
Time: 11:00 - 1:35pm
Time will be held for students to practice delivering an academic job talk. Each session will consist of a 40-minute presentation, 10-minutes for questions and answers, 15 minutes for feedback and discussion. Contact the graduate coordinator for more information.
Uriel Serrano: 11:00 am - 12:05 pmYouth in The City Of Inmates: Racialized Emotions and Carceral Seepage
Drawing on four years of multi-sited fieldwork conducted in Los Angeles, I examine the contemporary policing experiences of Black and Latinx boys and young men. Mainly, I examine how the young men make sense of criminalization and policing, and how these experiences produce racial subjects with racialized emotions. In so doing, I will move us towards an understanding of the mechanism and practices that make criminalization a constant and omnipresent experience for Black and Latinx youth.
Julian Rodriguez: 12:30 - 1:35 pmLGBTQ YouTube: Community and Branding through New Media
Algorithms and online platforms like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and YouTube are increasingly shaping our politics, economics, and public life more generally. Given histories of discrimination in offline media industries, underrepresented people turn to these platforms to represent themselves and share their stories. In this talk, I present findings from a three-year digital ethnography of YouTube, focusing on LGBTQ video creators, their video content, and their viewers. I illustrate that YouTube brands itself as a progressive company by publicizing “advertiser-friendly” LGBTQ video creators with diverse identities. Yet the company algorithmically censors and defunds YouTube users who produce content controversial to the platform’s advertising partners. Even so, creators manage to navigate the platform’s technological structures to share stories of identity development, pride, and belonging, inspiring viewers to accept their own identities and become video producers themselves. I conclude by discussing the political limitations and possibilities for minoritized media activists and users on social media platforms.
Book Launch! Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship
Tuesday, November 09, 2021
Time: 12:00-1:30 PST
Join Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the UCSC Center for Labor Studies Steve McKay in celebration of the launch of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship (Rutgers University Press 2021) by UCSC's Catherine S. Ramírez (LALS), Sylvanna M. Falcón (LALS), Juan Poblete (LALS), Steven C. McKay (Sociology), Felicity Amaya Schaeffer (Feminist Studies). Cover art by UCSC's Lewis Watts (Art). Moderated by Camilla Hawthorne (Sociology).
Precarity and Belonging examines how the movement of people and their incorporation, marginalization, and exclusion, under epochal conditions of labor and social precarity affecting both citizens and noncitizens, have challenged older notions of citizenship and alienage.
Learn more at: https://catherinesramirez.com/research/precarity-and-belonging-labor-migration-and-noncitizenship/
30% discount United States code: RFLR19 (flyer)
Hosted by University Relations.
Sociology Mixtapes Volume 04: Joseph Klett
Thursday, January 20, 2022
Time: 12:00 - 1:15pm
This Sociology Mixtapes session features Sociology Lecturer Joseph Klett.
Joseph Klett is a sociologist of culture and technology with a focus on sonic practices. He is currently teaching SOCY115: Introduction to Sound Studies.
Sociology Works-in-Progress
Thursday, February 03, 2022
Time: 12:00 - 1:15pm
This Sociology Works-in-Progress session features graduate students Michelle Gomez Parra, Theresa Hice-Fromille, and Roxanna Villalobos. Facilitated by Juan Pedroza with Rebecca London as discussant.
Michelle Gomez Parra on When an "Anchor Baby" Studies Heteronormativity and Mobility
How do experiences of migration and higher education (as two forms of mobility) shape Latinas' relationship to and awareness of heteronormativity? In what ways do Latinas' mobility experiences shape their own gender and sexual subjectivities as well as generational negotiations of gender and sexuality? In this presentation, I discuss the theoretical interventions that these questions pose to the three fields: sociology, queer studies, and sexualities studies. I then discuss preliminary findings from my dissertation research to illustrate how intersecting formations and forces shape mobile Latinas' relationship to heteronormativity—consequently shaping their own subjectivities and how they enact intergenerational teachings of gender and sexuality.
Theresa Hice-Fromille on Healing Charm City: Black Girl Geographies in Baltimore
In February 2019 shots rang out in a West Baltimore City high school. The event provoked three students in particular into action. The trio of juniors became student spokespeople for the Elijah Cummings Healing City Act and collaborated with city council through the bill’s passing a year later. The bill has since transformed, spurring the passage of the Healing Maryland’s Trauma Act and elevating the trauma-informed care initiative to the state level. But what remains to be examined are the interventions of the Black girls whose dedication made these events possible. In this presentation, I discuss the ways that Black girls traverse Baltimore, a city with a political history rife with systematic racism (Pietila 2010; Lawrence 2021). My analysis of one student’s recorded testimonies and personal interviews further integrates Black Geographies and Black Girlhood Studies and emphasizes the “underrecognized contribution of Black girls to Black resistance, culture, and survival” (Hill 2021).
Roxanna Villalobos on Towards a Transnational Rural Girlhood Framework
In this presentation, I will discuss the conceptual trajectory of theorizing and constructing a transnational rural girlhood framework to study girls of color living in rural contexts. This framework links different disciplines to understand how the concepts of “rural” and “girlhood” converge to create a discourse of rural girlhood that impacts real-life rural girls in context-specific ways in relation to multiple, mutually constitutive scales – local, regional, national, and transnational. This presentation will elucidate how my dissertation research employs a “bottom-up” approach that centers rural girls of color to understand how intersecting global power structures are reinforced, negotiated, mediated, and/or contested in everyday contexts.
Jamila Raqib on Nonviolent Action & Community-Based Research: Building tools for stronger movements
Thursday, May 05, 2022
Time: 12-1:30pm
As part of her campus visit hosted by the Right Livelihood College at UCSC, Jamila Raqib, a specialist in the study and practice of strategic nonviolent action and the executive director of the Albert Einstein Institution, will visit the Sociology department for a discussion on using community-based research methods to amplify AEI's Strategic Estimate process for nonviolent social movements.
About the Strategic Estimate Workbook: The Albert Einstein Institution is developing a Strategic Estimate Workbook that will guide activists and organizers through the initial research needed to plan an effective strategy. A strategic estimate asks groups to conduct an in-depth analysis of their general conflict situation and of the objectives, strengths, and weaknesses of all parties to the conflict. The document provides essential preparatory information and can be continuously updated to serve as a reference tool for movement leaders as they respond to opportunities and crises during their struggle.
Jamila Raqib is a specialist in the study and practice of strategic nonviolent action and the executive director of the Albert Einstein Institution, which works to advance the research and application of nonviolent action worldwide. For more than 15 years, she worked closely with late Right Livelihood Laureate Dr. Gene Sharp, the world’s foremost scholar of the field of strategic nonviolent action, and collaborated on the publication of Self-Liberation: A Guide to Strategic Planning for Action to End a Dictatorship or Other Oppression. Since 2002, she’s focused on the development and distribution of educational resources on nonviolent action and has conducted workshops on strategic planning for human rights organizations, universities, governmental bodies, and groups opposing dictatorship and combating corruption, and struggling to attain political rights, economic justice, environmental protection, and women’s empowerment.
From Dissertation to Book: a conversation with James Doucet-Battle
Thursday, May 12, 2022
Time: 12-1:15pm
Join us to discuss Professor James Doucet-Battle's book titled Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). In Sweetness in the Blood, Doucet-Battle takes the reader on an unexpected journey in a critical examination of successive and interrelated technological moments. He tells how the drive to collect African-descent human DNA faces long standing challenges to overcome public distrust in biomedical research and why the gendered directionality of genomic research on Type 2 diabetes raises both novel and enduring issues of social injustices, community resource disparities, and racial exclusion from the wider socioeconomic field.
Theresa Hice‑Fromille and Kaylee Alyssa Roberts -- current UCSC Ph.D. students -- will join Professor Doucet-Battle in a discussion of his book and the process of transforming a dissertation into a book.
Intoxications and Their Meanings: On the Politics of Consciousness Alteration
Thursday, May 19, 2022
Time: 12-1:15pm
Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Legal Studies Craig Reinarman is the 2021 recipient of the Distinguished Social Sciences Emeriti Award from the UCSC Social Sciences Division. He was honored for his profound impact on the shifting discourse and public opinion surrounding drug policy, including the move toward the legalization of cannabis. As a sociologist with over 26 years of experience in researching, writing, and teaching about law, crime, social justice, drugs and addiction in society, and political sociology, Reinarman’s work has focused on the political, public policy, and sociological issues surrounding crack/cocaine in the United States, as well as the way crack cocaine has been presented in the media and political discourse. He has published widely on drug use, addiction, law, treatment, and policy.
Mario Avalos and William Guerrero -- current UCSC sociology Ph.D. students -- will join Professor Reinarman and attendees in a discussion of Reinarman's impact on sociology.
Graduate Student Professionalization Workshop: Exit Talks
Thursday, June 02, 2022
Time: 12-1:15pm
Location: RCC 301 + ZoomIn celebrating those graduating with their Ph.D.'s, time will be held for students to give a brief talk based on their dissertations. Join us in celebrating their remarkable achievements and learning more about their work. Contact the graduate coordinator for more information.
Each will give a brief talk based on their dissertation and/or current research:
Toni Rouhana: The civil war paths project
The Civil War Paths project understands civil wars as a social phenomenon that unfolds from pre to post-war periods. The talk will include the theoretical framework and methods of the project, three case studies of Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, an initial comparison of the cases at the onset of the war and future research.
Julian Rodriguez: LGBTQ YouTube: Algorithmic Discrimination and Negotiations through Social Media
Algorithms and online platforms like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and YouTube are increasingly shaping our politics, economics, and public life. Given histories of discrimination in offline media industries, underrepresented people turn to these platforms to represent themselves and share their stories. This talk illustrates that YouTube algorithmically censors and defunds queer YouTube users who produce politically controversial videos. Even so, creators negotiate and resist the platform's limitations to continue connecting with their communities.
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