Curriculum Vitae Elizabeth A. Williamson Department of Social
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Curriculum Vitae Elizabeth A. Williamson Department of Social Sciences and Society of Fellows, University of Chicago 5845 S Ellis Ave., Rm. 404 Gates-Blake Chicago, IL 60637 Phone: (773) 702-3319 Fax: (773) 834-0493 Email: williamsone at uchicago dot edu Webpage: http://home.uchicago.edu/~williamsone/Home_page.html EMPLOYMENT 2012-present Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences Division Harper-Schmidt Fellow, Society of Fellows University of Chicago EDUCATION 2012 Ph.D., Sociology Rutgers University Dissertation title: Fostering Flexibility: Emotions, Power, and Framing Processes in a Socio-Religious Movement. Committee: Benjamin Zablocki (Chair), Karen Cerulo, John Levi Martin, Ann Mische. 2003 M.A., Sociology University of Virginia Thesis title: Direct Selling Organization Change: A Boolean Analysis of Ideology and Other Factors, Chair: Steve Nock. 2000 A.B., Sociology B.S., Psychology University of Georgia Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa PUBLICATIONS Articles and Book Chapters Elizabeth Williamson. 2011. “The Magic of Multiple Emotions: The Relationship Between Emotional Intensity Shifts and Recruiting/Training Event Reattendance.” Sociological Forum 26, vol. 1: 45-70. This paper received an Honorable Mention for the Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section Graduate Student Paper Award in 2011. 1 W. Bradford Wilcox and Elizabeth Williamson. 2006. "The Cultural Contradictions of Mainline Family Ideology and Practice." Pp. 37-55 in American Religions and the Family: How Faith Traditions Cope with Modernization and Democracy. Edited by Don S. Browning and David A. Clairmont (New York: Columbia University Press). Book Reviews Elizabeth Williamson. 2013. “The American Soul Rush: Esalen and the Rise of Spiritual Privilege by Marion Goldman.” American Journal of Sociology Vol. 118, No. 6: 1723-1725. Other publications 2012 Posted in the “Daily Disruption” section of the Mobilizing Ideas blog. 2005-2007 Co-author with various members of the Contexts Student Board of “Discoveries: New and Noteworthy Research.” Contexts, Vol. 6, No. 4: 5–9; Vol. 6, No. 2: 6– 10; Vol. 6, No. 1: 8–11; Vol. 5, No. 4: 8–12; Vol. 5, No. 3: 4–9; Vol. 5, No. 2: 5– 10; Vol. 4, No. 4: 8–14; and Vol. 4, No. 3: 8–14. RESEARCH INTERESTS Sociology of Emotions, Collective Behavior and Social Movements, Sociology of Religion, Sociology of the Body and Embodiment, Research Methods, Social Psychology, Theory, Sociology of Organizations, Gender Stratification, and Sociology of Culture. BOOK MANUSCRIPT IN PROGRESS The Reclaiming movement combines feminist, Earth-based, NeoPagan religion with progressive social activism and is known for running week-long “Intensive” retreat events (also known as Witchcamps) in secluded, usually rural, campground settings. These research sites enable me to study emotion dynamics in situ, refine my own theories about particular emotions and emotion patterns, and test hypotheses about how factors such as combinations of emotions, unexpected bodily sensations and holistic shifts in cognitions, emotions, and sensations within and outside of the emotionally intense group rituals affect commitment outcomes. I was fortunate enough to be allowed full access to both the Intensives themselves as well as meetings held by the event organizers of the Mid-Atlantic community. This level of trust takes years to build, and has enabled me to study my own reactions to rituals, take “advanced” roles at camp, and be immersed in an environment where both leaders and average campers openly reflect about their own emotions as well as what did and did not work within the event. Reclaiming is a rare case of a new religious movement that attempts to foster religious and activist commitments while giving them each equal emphasis and recruiting people into “magical activism.” The Intensives focus around emotionally provocative myths, which help socialize participants into thinking, emoting, and perceiving the world in flexible, paradoxical ways. Reclaiming has created what I refer to as an emotion counterculture, which makes space for ecstatic positive emotions as well as deep Jungian-style work with negative emotions and one’s “shadow” self. Both the emotion counterculture as a whole and some specific technologies for 2 running ritual and provoking intense emotions can be exported into other allied movements as well as mainstream Western culture. Reclaiming in the twenty-first century is a resource-rich movement that is part of a web-like network of progressive groups and the movement survives in spite of using a less demanding “and-logic” which lets participants identify as “Reclaiming and” other groups rather than only “Reclaiming or” another religious or activist organization. I argue that Reclaiming has a strong potential to influence both dominant American culture and groups such as Occupy in the decades to come because Reclaiming has crafted a sustainable emotion counterculture that does not place a heavy emphasis on either happiness or a hope-despair cycle. This is a resource which should not be underestimated as scholars continue to bring emotions and culture back into sociological studies of social and religious movements. The book Witches for a Week: Crafting an Emotion Counterculture uses data from an American variant of feminist Witchcraft, which emerged out of British Traditional Witchcraft starting in the 1960s; the magical socialization processes I focus on in the book have a great degree of overlap with those of other occultists and magicians as well as Druids, Heathens, Asatruar, and Neo-Pagans generally. Reclaiming specifically, and groups with magical worldviews generally, are sociologically rich cases of innovation at the margins of mainstream society that are critical for advancing our theorizing about sustainable lifestyles, emotion cultures, and self-transformations that operate on varied timelines: days, weeks, years, and decades. “Magical activism” is tough sell both because the religious beliefs are esoteric and stigmatized and because of the arguably high potential for cognitive, emotional, and somatic burnout from dividing one’s attention between religion and activism. Reclaiming has sustained itself for several decades and expanded throughout North America into Europe and Australia in spite of these challenges and the movement’s less demanding “and-logic”, which should interest anyone concerned with studying social and religious movements and (formal) organizations. Fully internalizing a mature form of the movement’s perspective often involves becoming more cognitively, emotionally, and perceptually flexible as a person makes repeated revisions to one’s own self and notions of what constitutes “magic” and “activism.” This persuasive process may not be pretty- Reclaiming Intensives encourage shadow work that stirs up an array of negative emotions- but I think there are valuable lessons to be learned about conceptualizing emotions and emotional fluctuations over time from precisely this kind of case. The Reclaiming Intensives are crucibles for cognitive, emotional, and somatic-sensory work done outside of everyday life during retreats like pilgrimages. Both leaders and average campers at the Intensives openly reflect about their successes and failures at creating rituals, and this reflexivity among the participants themselves provided an additional layer of information about the Intensives. The research design had four components: 1) a three year longitudinal study (2004-2006) of two annual Intensive events held in different locations in the Eastern United States, 2) a cross- sectional comparison of data gathered during 2007 at four recruiting and training events in different regions of the United States and Canada, 3) supplementary data collected at quarterly organizer meetings of one group as well as observations from the Inter-Reclaiming gatherings and business meetings held in 2008 and 2010, and 4) a follow-up study conducted in 2014 at the original field site: Mid-Atlantic “Spiralheart” Intensive studied between 2004-6. The longitudinal part of the design incorporates data from field observations and in-depth interviews on emotion dynamics and organizational context as well as representative survey data from approximately two hundred participants at the two events in the longitudinal part of the study. The cross- sectional and 2014 data were collected using participant observation and in-depth interviews. 3 My book project draws on concepts and theories from several different sociological subfields to make strategic sense of the work Reclaiming tries to accomplish during the “Intensive” recruiting and training events. This work can be broadly construed as mixing 1) re-enchantment of everyday life; 2) healing the trauma from both modern life and one’s religious and activist efforts; and 3) resocialization into forms of thinking feeling and sensing compatible with the movement’s core values and likely to enhance a sustainable lifestyle. The Intensives make the participants perceive that magic is happening by provoking intense positive and intense negative emotions as well as combinations of emotions using a variety of ritual technologies. I bring together work on frames and framing processes, recruitment or conversion and commitment to movements, emotions, empowerment, and structural arrangements within small groups, and persuasive processes involving cognitions, emotions, and the body in order to examine the extent to which the Intensives are successful at getting people recruited and committed to Reclaiming