Newsletter 2011 Web Version
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NU Sociology Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences A Newsletter from the Department of Sociology Chair’s statement — The four colleagues we celebrate today each represent the excellence and scholarly courage that Northwestern Sociology is known for. Jeremy Freese January 2011 Investiture Event In This Issue . On November 10, 2010 a ceremony was held by the Dean of the Wein- berg College of Arts and Sciences, Sarah Mangelsdorf, to celebrate Faculty Recognition recently endowed fellowships. This was the first time the College has celebrated the installation of four chair-holders in one department a Sociology Library single ceremony. Notable Alumni Steve Epstein, John C. Shaffer Professor in the Humanities Interdisciplinary Wendy Griswold, Clusters Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities Alumni Profile Aldon Morris, Leon Forrest Professor of Sociology Qatar Mary Pattillo, Harold Washington Professor of Sociology and African American Studies Let us hear from you: Our Department does not just represent an intellectual discipline. Department of Sociology It is also a place where people teach and learn, meet requirements for Alumni News degrees, prepare for and pursue careers, and develop and maintain 1810 Chicago Avenue intellectual, professional, and personal ties. Evanston, IL 60208 Phone: (847) 491-5415 Books and articles by the faculty and students regularly win prizes Fax: (847) 491-9907 and honors, and we do extremely well in national ranking systems. [email protected] Even our most demanding courses are well received by both majors and non-majors. One could make a plausible case for eavesdropping on our hallway conversations as a good introduction to the sociologi- cal imagination. Page 2 Investiture Awards In the late 1980s, as I was White—were all ideal men- pursuing my studies as a tors. All professors working graduate student at Berke- with doctoral programs, in- ley while living across the cluding myself, try to offer bay in San Francisco, I stinging critiques of the sta- their students this type of found myself at Ground Ze- tus of AIDS research. As I mentoring. ro of a medical and social began to study them, I disaster. This was a time learned that these AIDS Wendy Griswold before combination an- treatment activists had set tiretroviral therapy, a time of out on a grand project to My parents decided I would governmental inaction on a transform public health in participate in Milwaukee’s mass scale, a time when the United States by, as relatively new high school public discourse surround- they put it, getting drugs bussing program that sent ing AIDS still often centered into bodies — altering the city students of color to around the idea that devas- procedures of drug schools in Milwaukee’s pre- tating illness was God’s discovery, testing, and dominately white suburbs. I revenge for immorality. It licensing in order to speed went to Whitefish Bay (nick was a grim time. But it up the scientific response named White Folks Bay). occurred to me then that if to a deadly disease. I ended All of the black students sociology was something up arguing that AIDS activ- attending the school were worth doing, then it ought ists served as a model of bused in. This experience to have something to say how laypeople might, at cultivated in me an interest about the consequential least sometimes, usefully in race, class, inequality, events that were unfolding contribute to the advance- and place. We black all around me. With that ment of biomedical students took the public assessment in mind, I set knowledge, and I suggested bus into and out of White- out to write a dissertation that their interventions had fish Bay every day. We about the AIDS epidemic. in fact provided a template might have desegregated But what sort of disserta- for all sorts of patient asso- Whitefish Bay, but we sure- tion? In one of those path- ciations that have arisen in ly did not integrate it. In- altering accidents of timing their wake. stead, we lived in parallel and circumstance, I became Steven Epstein worlds – our predominately fascinated by a kind of white wealthy school in the activism that I saw emerg- The inspiration doctoral suburbs and our predomi- ing in places like San students receive from their nately black poor, working Francisco. Central to the professors constitutes the class, and middle class agenda of these activists single most important neighborhoods in the city – was a remarkable mode of influence shaping in the a DuBoisian double con- engagement with biomedi- development of schol- sciousness for sure. It was c a l k n o w l e d g e a n d ars. The examples of key this experience that I shared expertise. I remember going role models from my own when I visited the office of to community forums where graduate school days — my advisor, William Julius activists with no formal the sociologists, Orlando Wilson, in my first year of medical or scientific Patterson, Theda Skocpol, graduate school at the training got up and gave Ann Swidler, and Harrison University of Chicago. Mary Pattillo Page 3 Racial oppression, the Civil Rights Move- duced to sociology. Because of the ment, the Vietnam War, and the influences knowledge I gained from gifted teachers of gifted, devoted, teachers at Olive Harvey there, I considered making scholarship my Junior College and Bradley University were life-long profession. From there I attended the factors that drove me to become a Bradley University where my knowledge of scholar. sociology and scholarship deepened be- One of my earliest memories is the 1955 cause of my studies with additional gifted lynching of fourteen year old Emmett Till of teachers. It was at this point that I decided Chicago in Money, Mississippi located just to dedicate my professional life to soci- a few miles from where I lived. I became a ology and scholarship. part of the Till Generation because his All scholarship is rooted in personal lynching taught me about the wholesale biography. I have always tried to engage in injustice of Jim Crow racism. That racism scholarship and activism that look human led me to become a scholar of the Civil inequality squarely in the eyes. I do so Rights Movement and racial inequality. because it is my belief that scholarship The Vietnam War led me to enroll at Olive seeking to understand oppression is indis- Harvey Junior college so I could obtain a pensable to discovering the keys that un- deferment because I thought the war lock doors to freedom. unwise. It was there that I was first intro- Aldon Morris Book Award Highest Honors The Russian version of Profes- John Hagan, John D. MacArthur Professor sor Georgi Derluguian's book, of Sociology and Law, and Co-director of Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Center on Law and Globalization at the the Caucasus, won first prize in American Bar Foundation in Chicago, was the social thought, category of recently elected to the American the national book selection Academy of Arts and Sciences. (Russia's national book award). Hagan pioneered the application of Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in advanced crime-measurement techniques the Caucasus is an account of to the study of genocide in his empirical the rise and fall of Soviet socialism. work on violence in Darfur and the Balkans Derluguian reconstructs from firsthand in 2003-2005 and was honored with the accounts the life story of Musa Shanib, who Stockholm Prize in Criminology in 2009. from a small town in the Caucasus grew to be Using systematic methods of estimating an intellectual reformer and, after 1989, a deaths from surveys administered by non- leader in several revolutions and wars, from governmental organizations and the U.S. Abkhazia to Chechnya. State Department, Hagan led research Shanib's story allows Derluguian to add a studies that found that widely circulated human dimension to his analysis of abstract murder estimates in the tens of thousands notions like globalization, the end of in Darfur should have been in the hundreds communism, democratization, the politics of of thousands. ethnic identity, and terrorism. Simultaneously He is the co-author of Darfur and the drawing on the work of Charles Tilly, Crime of Genocide, which received the Immanuel Wallerstein, and Bourdieu. American Sociological Association Crime, Derluguian presents an explanation of ethnic Law and Deviance Section's Albert J. Reiss wars in the wake of Soviet collapse. Distinguished Publication Award and the American Society of Criminology's Michael J. Hindelang Book Award. Page 4 Sociology Library Sociology Notable Alumni David Harris (PhD 1997) is currently on Hector Carrillo leave from his position as Deputy Provost The Night Is Young: Sexuality (and Professor of Sociology) at Cornell in Mexico in The Time of AIDS University to serve in the Obama administra- University of Chicago Press, 2001 tion as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Human Services Policy in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation under the Department of Health and Human Anthony S. Chen Services. This group focuses on policy The Fifth Freedom: Jobs, related to welfare, poverty, service delivery Politics, and Civil Rights in the issues, data for research, policies affecting United States, 1941-1972 children, youth, and families and economic Princeton University Press, 2009 matters affecting HHS. Steven Epstein Judith Blau (PhD 1972) is currently Inclusion: The Politics of Professor of Sociology at the University of Difference in Medical Research North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is a prolific University of Chicago Press, 2009 scholar whose recent work has focused on human rights and the difficulties and paradox- es of attempts to implement human rights agendas. She is the Director of the Human Wendy Griswold Rights Center of Chapel Hill & Carrboro.