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Sociology Colloquia Series

The overarching goal of the Sociology Colloquia Series is to build intellectual engagement and community in our department for faculty and graduate students alike.

For the 2024-2025 academic year, the department will focus on the following types of hybrid gatherings: those in which we share our own research and professionalization workshops for graduate students. Unless otherwise noted, department events will run Thursdays from 12-1:15pm via a hybrid mode (RCC 301 and Zoom).

Suggestions for hosted gatherings can be submitted using this online form, emailed to the department assistant or sociology@ucsc.edu.

    Winter 2025 Quarter

  • Graduate Student Dissertation Talks

    Thursday, February 13, 2025

    Time: 11:40 - 1:15pm
    Location: RCC 301 + Zoom Registration

    Join us in RCC 301 or on Zoom for presentations by Sociology Graduate Students: Sarah Mason and Ankit Sharma.

    Sarah Mason is a UCSC Sociology Graduate Student and Program Director for the UCSC Center for Labor and Community.

    This dissertation will examine how the labor process shapes the progression and outcome of strike action. Contemporary scholarly literature on strikes utilizes theoretical frameworks and concepts largely drawn from the study of collective behavior and social movements to understand why and how workers take action (Rhomberg & Lopez, 2021). These scholars provide important insights into how strikers mobilize internal and external resources to wrest concessions from their employers (Dixon & Martin, 2012; Lopez, 2004; Mirola, 2003; Schmalz, Ludwig, & Webster, 2018; Kallas, 2024), how strikers “frame” or make meaning out of their conditions in order to mobilize one another (Schmitt 1993; Conell & Conn, 1995; Martin, 2003; Coley, 2015; Danaher & Dixon, 2017; Levine, Cobb, & Roussin 2017), how workers’ perception of political opportunities and threats may spur collective action (Barrie & Ketchley, 2018), and how differences in strategic capacity shape the efficacy of workplace organizing (Ganz, 2009). However, unions are not social movement organizations and workers differ from other movement activists in important ways (McAlevey 2015; Rhomberg & Lopez, 2021). This dissertation will argue that, while social movement literature has been a useful resource for those studying labor movements, it fails to capture a key determinant underpinning the shape of strike action: the labor process. To advance my argument, I will analyze a series of strike actions that took place amongst academic workers at the University of California, Santa Cruz between 2019 and 2024. Drawing on the varied tradition of workers’ inquiry, I utilize movement ephemera, internal and external communications, collective writing projects, original photographs, and workers’ own account of their strike action(s) to demonstrate how the academic labor process (teaching and research, specifically) influenced strategy, tactics, and the feelings of collectivity necessary to sustain militant action.

    Ankit Sharma is a UCSC Sociology Graduate Student.

    My dissertation titled “World(s) of Precarity: Place, Time, and Traditions of Labor Movements of Informal Workers in Delhi” is situated in the ongoing challenges posed to movements by the proliferation of precarity while the world becomes more conservative, authoritarian, and neoliberal. To undertake the challenge, the dissertation studies the case of Okhla Industrial Estate in Delhi, established in 1958, that evidence the entangled nature of the following: integral to nation-building from its early years, precarious work at its foundation, and yet have a rich history of labor movement and ‘riots.’ Okhla contributes to conversations about the mentioned challenges by evidencing how workers continue to struggle despite decades of an unfavorable State regime, failed promises of development and progress, limited union capacities, and any substantive wins. At its core, building from the specific character of precarity that workers who come to Okhla experience, the dissertation answers the following questions: a) what does it mean to study a movement even when it doesn’t visibly exist, and why? And b) can a labor movement have its own traditions that challenge the mythical world(s) recalled as traditional ways of being by the Hindu right-wing in India?

    • Spring 2025 Quarter

  • TBD with Xuefei Ren

    Thursday, TBD, 2025

    Time: 12:00 - 1:15pm
    Location: RCC 301 + Zoom

    Join the Center for Critical Urban & Environmental Studies (CUES) and WUI Research for Resilience (WRR) scholars, in RCC 301 and over Zoom, for a discussion with Xuefei Ren on on Governing the Urban in China and India: Land Grabs, Slum Clearance and the War on Air Pollution (Princeton University Press).

    Xuefei Ren is a comparative urbanist who studies urban governance and the built environment in comparative perspective. She is the author of three award-winning books: Governing the Urban in China and India: Land Grabs, Slum Clearance, and the War on Air Pollution (Princeton University Press, 2020), Urban China (Polity, 2013), and Building Globalization: Transnational Architecture Production in Urban China (University of Chicago Press, 2011). She is a Public Intellectual Fellow of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and a fellow in the Humanity’s Urban Future program of Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). She has served as a co-editor for Journal of Urban Affairs, City and Community, and on the editorial board of International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Her research has been supported by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Andrew Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Urban Studies Foundation, among others. Her new projects include The City after Covid-19, which examines vulnerability and urban governance in Chicago, Toronto and Johannesburg.

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