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UT Social Research Workshop

Co-Organizers:
Timothy M. Gill, Associate Professor of Sociology
Harry F. Dahms, Professor of Sociology

The purpose of the UT Social Research Workshop is to cultivate a space wherein professors and graduate students can engage in open and constructive discussion about their works-in-progress. The hope is that as a result of such discussions that scholars might enhance their work and move towards eventual publication. We will send out papers in advance, and we ask attendants to read papers before our meetings so that they might best assist our guests with suggestions and constructive criticism. Should you not have time to read the paper, you are still most welcome to join us. Within the workshop itself, presenters will talk about their paper for 5-10 minutes. The remainder of the time is reserved for open and constructive discussion.

*NOTE: The current semester is at the bottom!

FALL SEMESTER 2020

October 16, 3:30-5:00: “Economic Competition and Police-Caused Killings”

  • Stephanie Bohon, Professor of Sociology, University of Tennessee
  • Ruben Ortiz, Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture

*

November 13, 4:00-5:30: “The Currency of Classical Critical Theory:  Rackets, Authoritarian Personalities, Administered World (and the Prospect of Vitacide)”

  • Harry F. Dahms, Professor of Sociology and Co-Chair of the Committee on Social Theory, University of Tennessee

    *

November 20: “Putting Out Fires: The Varying Temporalities of Disasters”

*

December 04: “The Effect of Economic Shocks on Individual Preferences for Redistribution – The Case Study of Greece”

  • Eszter Timar, Graduate Student in Sociology, University of Tennessee


SPRING SEMESTER 2021

January 22: “‘Like a Hotel Stay’: Pay-to-Stay and the Production of Incarceration as a Public Commodity”

  • Brittany Friedman, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Faculty Affiliate of the Program in Criminal Justice and the Center for Security, Race, and Rights, Rutgers University

*

February 12: “The Structural Location of Blackness”

*

March 05: “Income Inequality in Rich Democracies: Identifying the Distributional Mechanisms of Structural Change and Institutional Context”

*

March 26: “Land Grabbing in Colombia and Environmental Governance Mechanisms”

  • Álvaro Germán Torres Mora, Graduate Student in Sociology, University of Tennessee

*

April 2: “The Anatomy of Regime Change: Iraqi Exiles, Neoconservatives, and the Invasion of Iraq”

SUMMER SEMESTER 2021

May 19: “The Legal Violence of Calling the Police: Abolition and New Radical Municipalism”

  • Michelle Brown (University of Tennessee), Kyra Martinez (University of Tennessee), and Vivian Swayne (University of Tennessee)

*

June 2: “Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place”

*

June 9: “Palm ‘Waste’ as Flex Crop in the Neoliberal Asian Epoch”

*

June 16: “My War on Error…”

*

June 23: “On Race and its Overdetermination: Blackness and Whiteness in the Muslim World”

*

June 30: “The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend: Symbolic Boundary Shift and Civil War Recurrence in Mid-Twentieth Century Colombia”

*

July 7: “Democratic Practice amidst Precarious Opportunity: Grounded Insights from the Post-Arab Spring, Pre-Civil War Period in Yemen and Libya (2012-13)”

*

July 28:  “The 1919-1920 Uprising (Trinidad and Tobago)”

 

FALL SEMESTER 2021

September 10: “Race Self-Labeling Decisions for Multiracial People: The Impact of Gender, Social Class, and Political Party Affiliation”

*

September 24: “Capitalism and Tutelage: How Liberal Democratization Reconstituted Race”

*

October 8: “How Will We Move: Modeling Climate-Driven Age-Specific Displacement Migration”

*

October 22:  “Gaslighting as a Response to Sexual Harassment”

*

November 12: “Queer Theory and the Future of Work”

  • AJ Knowles (University of Tennessee and University of Bielefeld, Germany)

*

November 19: “Rethinking the Environmental Significance of Race: Blackness and the Socioecological Afterlife of Slavery”

 

SPRING SEMESTER 2022 

February 4: “The War on Everyone: An Update on the Political Economy of Private Military & Private Security Companies”

*

February 11: TBA,

*

February 18: “Power Plants Legacies: The Temporalities of Energy Justice from Coal Ash to the Virtual Power Plant”

*

February 25: Violence: “The Formation and Dissolution of the Racist Self

*

March 4: “Socioecological Change in 21st Century Indonesia: Forest Fires, Responsibility, and the Politics of Commodity Frontiers”

*

March 25: “Reproduction, Rumors, and Religion: the Political Economy of Family Planning in Senegal”

*

April 1: “Politics of Exclusion: Conservative Movements and Networks Invested in the Marginalization of LGBTQ+ Peoples”

 

FALL SEMESTER 2022

September 30: “The Role of Environmentalism in Left and Right Xenophobia in the United States”

  • Stephanie Bohon, Maddie Ross, Christian Lewelling, Nadya Vera, and Ashley Browning (University of Tennessee)

*

October 28: “No Time to Reflect: 007, International Politics, and Conflict Through the Lens of Planetary Sociology”

*

November 04: “Cotton, Whiteness & Other Poisons”


*

November 11: “The Subservient Role of Diversity and Inclusion in the Making of White Academia: An Analysis of a Diversity and Inclusion Center at a Flagship University”

*

December 02: “Tipping Hats, Riding Coattails: Reference Networks in American Country Music”

Spring Semester 2023

February 10:  “The Knoxville Power Elite”

  • Cameron Graham, Christian Lewelling, and  Jon Shefner (University of Tennessee)

*

February 17:  “The appeal and counter-productivity of property destruction as a climate change strategy”

  • Ryan Gunderson (Miami University)

*

April 21:  “Artificial Intelligence between Relations of Production and Forces of Production”

  • Harry F. Dahms (University of Tennessee)

*

April 28: “Some kind of truth: photographish images as evidence”

  • Alison Gerber, Lund University

 

FALL SEMESTER 2023

October 13: “The Heritage Industrial Complex: History and the Settler Colonial Present in the Nation’s Oldest City”

  • Camille Petersen (University of Tennessee)